


The Highway Man

by mako_lies (wingeddserpent)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alpha Kevin Tran, Alpha Linda Tran, Alpha Sam Winchester, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Season/Series 10, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Heaven, M/M, Mother-Son Relationship, Not A Fix-It, POV First Person, POV Kevin Tran, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trope Subversion, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-02
Updated: 2015-12-02
Packaged: 2018-04-30 01:18:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 26,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5144978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wingeddserpent/pseuds/mako_lies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kevin wakes up from death to discover his mom has sold her soul. With only a year to save her, Kevin teams up with Sam to find Crowley and Dean. However, remembering how to be a functioning alpha is a daunting task, and Kevin finds himself struggling in a world that he wasn’t supposed to be part of anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Kevin Big Bang. I had the opportunity to collaborate with the amazing [Tkodami](http://tkodami.livejournal.com/), and [here](http://tkodami.livejournal.com/8568.html) is the lovely art she created. Go check it out!
> 
> Thanks to [Balder12](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Balder12) for all of the help and encouragement. 
> 
> The excerpts in-text are from Michael Chabon's _The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay_.
> 
>  
> 
> This work contains references to past canonical torture; mentions of past racism, sexism, and homophobia; PTSD; past canonical character death; canonical levels of alcohol use; and mild ABO dynamics.

I wake smelling dust and my mother's warmbitter scent. There is something wrong, I realize, the dust nagging at me like an implanted memory. My Heaven smells nothing like this. Heaven is pristine, like linen and mint, and sometimes like coffee if I'm in the mood. My Heaven smells like I described my house to my beta friends.

When betas find out you're an alpha, that's the first thing they want to know: what the world _smells_ like. (The second thing is your dick. If you’re lucky, they just ask you about your dick. Otherwise, they ask to _see_ it.)

At fourteen, I hadn't had the words to describe the nuances of scent. Hell, I was still figuring out how to work with all the new smells. Things that smelled too strongly back then would give me headaches, because my senses weren’t used to it yet.

Channing had smiled at me with curiosity, her fingers curling through mine possessively. I squeezed her hand for comfort as I realized: she had as much, if not more, at stake here. She was the beta girl brave enough to date an alpha boy. Not that the realization helped me think of something to say, so I just blurted that my house smelled _awesome_ , like mint and linen, just like those candles Channing loved. I lied without realizing I was inventing my eternity. I might have chosen something less boring, otherwise.

Or, at least, something _I_ liked, rather than what Channing liked. Maybe hot chocolate.

I turn my face into the pillow, but the dust lingers, thick in my nose, and I struggle to breathe through it. I don't need to breathe in Heaven though, the realization sharp even as my lungs ache for want of air. 

Something is wrong.

I shove myself up with hands that have already recalled trembling. My breath comes in sharp, heavy gasps that leave me more tired than if I hadn't been breathing. I want to calm down. I try to recall the anti-anxiety exercises learned from my therapist, but I can't think and the act isn't reflexive anymore. My room tilts when I stand.

In Heaven, my room was always glittering. Everything neat. No sharp lightning scar across the floor. No shattered picture frame or capsized cello, which is sitting like a beached whale covered in pale dust.

This isn't my Heaven. This isn't any Heaven.

But my surroundings don’t make sense, and I have no idea where I am.

Finally, my lungs fill. I attempt to pull open the door, but it stubbornly remains shut. I even hold up my hand to summon it open with all the intent of Luke Skywalker. Still nothing. So I give up and decide to go through it instead. Stupid to open doors when you can pass through it, anyway. Just one more way I’m clinging to the past.

Pain sends me staggering back, and I barely keep my footing.

The door stays exactly as it was: shut and solid, the grain even, and the wood dark. I drag my fingers over it, to find that my fingers don't pass through. I feel the grain beneath my fingertips.

On a hunch, I curl my fingers over the dull knob. The metal is cool to the touch like a blade. I pull the door open with a slow whining creak.

I try to recall the last door I opened manually. It was at the bunker, the place always quiet enough to raise the hairs on my arms; the whole place smelled of oil and dust and paper, with Sam's sharpsour scent never masked by his cheap soap, coupled with Dean's softer scent mostly covered by the same soap. The last time I opened a door, I'd left my room for a sandwich. Then—

_Sam's palm on my forehead, not Sam, notSam, too late, bright burst of pain, light, then—_

I choke again and nearly send myself careening down the stairs. That might be a problem if I do in fact prove to be corporeal. Like it’s looking increasingly likely I am. At least in this place. Wherever I am.

"Kevin?" Mom's voice from the foot of the stairs. I look down through the sweat curtain of my bangs. People often speak of belief as though it is some complicated thing that takes a journey to find, and maybe it is generally. For me, belief and its absence can be simple: a split second flash that decides for me.

I believe I'm not in Heaven because my mother has changed.

Her skin is grey, lined with age I can't recall. She is brittle, frail, like a dead tree in Michigan-winter hanging with frost. At the sight of me on the stairs, her face crumples up. She takes the stairs two at a time to reach me. A relief. I'd probably fall down them, with these corporeal legs of mine. Mom yanks me into a hug, and I bury my face in her should. I want it, regardless of whether it's real. She smells exactly as I remember, better than my memory, actually. In Heaven, she never smelled quite right. That familiar alphawarm smell of hers. I inhale deep enough my lungs burn. "Mom?" I croak, my voice harsh and gravely like Crowley's anger. "Where am I?"

"Home," she says with her clipped voice. The tone that warns against questions. About dad, about why she was crying, about why she has to work. My spine stiffens in memory.

All of this is so physical. How can I not believe her? Heaven never had this type of physicality. You could eat cabbage soup and have it taste like cotton candy on a whim. I do the unthinkable. "How? How am I back?" The curl of nausea whispers the answer as insidiously as the serpent. I know this story. I know the cost of my return. I know who has paid.

I pray God's been looking out for us. _Please don't let Mom have dealt with Crowley._

She shifts in my arms as I hug her tighter. Her sweat becomes bitter and heavy as I begin to tremble. A full body shake, now. I whisper, "No."

"Kevin." Mom cuts me off. "You just came back. You've got to be hungry."

"It was Crowley." Of course it was. Even in death, he can't let me go. There really is no escape for me. I step back to survey her. She watches my face with that firm set to her jaw that hasn't softened with time. My spark of anger is too difficult to keep, even as her expression confirms my fears. I've just exhausted myself breathing. Anger will come later. "How long?"

Mom grabs my hand in both of hers. Scars crisscross her skin, etched deep like they've been chiseled into old stone, and her fingers are crooked from breaking.

All things done to her in my name.

A chill breaks over my skin. She smells the same, but she isn't the same. Time has changed her, but not me. "I had to. I tried to—to—keep going without you." Her expression drifts to memory, a time that belongs only to her, and her hands tighten on mine enough her brittle bones creak. "Kevin. I couldn’t. I looked for another way. Phoenixes and old magic. I went to the Winchesters and their friend, Jody. I talked to angels. No one could or would help me." Mom's story breaks again.

Tears stream from her eyes as she brings her hands up to cup my face. Loss has always been nearly too much for my mother: even though I never met my father, his absence lived in our home. I was not my mother's first ghost. Sometimes, I'm not even sure was her second.

Too many weekends, she would sleep and sleep like she was dead, her body too heavy to rise. Grief is heavy for her and lingers. The older I got, the better she got at banishing the specters she became. I put my hands on her shoulders, and my hands don't pass through. "One day, outside the church I've been going to, a young woman approached me. I suspected she was a demon, but holy water confirmed it. She called herself Bela, representative to the King. I was out of options, so I took the deal."

I want to cry, but I'm not sure I remember how. Breathing is lost momentarily and my eyes _hurt_ but no water comes. "How long?" I demand.

"A year."

Of course. Crowley would never give my mother longer than Dean got.

I met Bobby at a time when somebody recalled rain fondly, and the water beat against the gleaming memorywood. We called it a Tuesday, but time held only the meaning we ascribed to it. Still, it was comforting as we rallied against our own powerlessness in the name of humanity. 

Gruffly, over his bottomless beer, he told me about the boys. About Dean's deal. About their destiny and the apocalypse. About Sam and his broken wall. "I just wanted to tell you that. Since you never got to know the boys at their best. Hell, you barely knew 'em at their worst. So don't judge 'em too harsh, all right?" Four beers later, he whispered to me, "Without you, I'd still be in the Pit. So, thank you. For all you did."

    

I pull her in for another hug and wish I hadn't let Bobby tell me about his time in Hell. The fate now awaiting my mother.

_Day 362_

My Heaven consisted of the house, all lineny and minty. It was almost always sunny, glittering outside like it was trying to beckon me out. Sometimes, it snowed. While it snowed in thick blankets, I watched out the window as the empty street became endless miles of white. The chill never crept into the house.

I turned back to my computers, running through calculations of Heaven. With all the violence in Heaven, I helped the others protect humans from the intentions—good or otherwise—of the angels. I suspect we simply couldn't accept our fates, because I’m not sure that there was much we could do against the angels. 

Work is an excellent distraction in death as it is in life. It was good to feel useful.

In my absence, Mom warded the house. All the sigils are painted blue over the windows and walls, because that bright endless blue is Mom's favorite. A year cut off from the sky, the color protects her now against demons and angels alike. I taught her the angel wards before I went to Heaven, the brush passing through my fingers as often as not. Precision work while you're without form is _always_ better in theory.

The lines of salt over every crevice and the wards create some illusion of security, even if I know from experience we will never be safe; still, the simulation is worth the chemical burn scent of the paint. B-friendly paint is cheaper than AO-friendly paint. I rub at my nose as I stare up at the Devil's Trap on the ceiling—I hate B-friendly paint, have since I presented. It smells like chemical death. Gives me a headache that used to be hard to ignore, but after the tablets, I barely notice.

I grab the shirt I lifted from mom's hamper this morning. Her soothing scent rolls over me. Lets me forget. I see her when she used to smile honestly, before the expression became staged for my benefit. I lay on the floor for a long time and consider sleeping.

In the past two days, sleep has been hell. Crowley grinned at me whenever I shut my eyes, his hands outstretched for me. _I torture all my friends._ I know—I _know_ —that this deal has everything to do with me. Crowley wants something from me and he'll extract it from me with my mom's soul dangling between his teeth.

I woke with sweat slicking the sheets to my skin and his cologne acrid in my nose, overpowering the detergent Mom used. Outside, the moon arched high in the sky, and I knew sleep was out of reach as one of those moon rocks. The moon probably knew it, too, the way it mocked me.

Floorboards creaked as I crept from bed, and that was the only noise in the house. In the world, maybe.

Cologne dogged me.Thick, cloying cologne that couldn't even hide the acridround scent of his omega body. The King of Hell chose an omega to possess, then covered the scent with his own. To what end, I couldn't say. I pressed my nose almost into my pit, the hair there damp with bitter sweat. My own scent wasn't enough. I snarled, breaking the Heaven-like silence; I needed something more. Something to banish him.

Even with wards, I felt him there. Crowley. His heat. The lilt of his voice. The cologne-acid-alluring scent I can't forget. _Sky's the limit_. I slammed into the laundry room door hard enough I fell flat on my ass, and my forehead stung. I'd have a bright red spot come morning. "Fuck you, Crowley," I called into the staticy air, but there was no answer. I remembered to open the door by hand this time.

Mom's laundry basket sat in front of the dryer, rank enough it'd probably been there awhile. I could smell her over Crowley. I grabbed a gauzy orange shirt, gone crisp with old sweat. I pressed it to my nose, and banished Crowley with my mother's scent.

A temporary fix. After all, Crowley owned my mother in 362 days.

Mom says nothing when she sees the banishing shirt curled in my fist. She leans in the doorway and observes me on the floor, expression soft enough it's as if everything is okay. That everything is okay despite the fact she decided my life meant more than her soul.

My eyes burn again, and I wipe at them with the shirt, the harsh flimsy material rubbing against my lids till they're raw. Crowley's crowing his victory, and Mom's just happy I'm alive. I don't remember how to be. I fling the shirt aside with a bird sound escaping my throat in frustration. Alphas don’t cry. Alpha men don’t cry. Don’t fucking cry.

(They also don’t sniff their mom’s gross old shirts, but I’ve always been a crappy alpha.)

"It's okay," she says, her puffed up alpha voice that prickles under my skin like thousands of partially dull needles. I set my jaw. It was easier to accept her dominance when I was a kid, but these days, part of me wants to rebel on principle, even as I want to sink into the comfort of her words. I might have made a better omega, in all honesty. "I made lunch."

With the shirt cast aside, I can barely smell the spicy tacos over the chemical paint. After everything, we decided being vegan was low on our priorities. "You could have asked me for help," I say, more growl than I intend.

Mom sighs. "Just eat, Kevin. Now."

I do it, but gracelessly. My fork scrapes loudly over my plate as I chase my food around and around, and the entire act of eating leaves me even more testy and tired as Mom watches me. Her mouth is pursed and disapproving.

In Heaven, eating was entirely recreational. I drank coffee by the gallon for the illusion of heat, and without my stomach twisting into a carnival balloon animal. The biggest eater of all of us was Sarah Blake. According to Rufus, she arrived shortly before I did, screaming at the angels and the Winchesters loud enough Pamela heard her on one of the monitoring systems and brought her into the Roadhouse fold.

Heaven made a glutton of Sarah. She ate pie and burritos and latkes and stew and salad and mangos and kugel. Sometimes, she even made a show of cooking the food first and inviting everyone to dinner. Whenever I saw her, she had food at hand, going through the motions of chewing.

"My husband generally cooked," she told me one Friday. "But I used to make cabbage soup for the kids."

I poked my spoon at it and ate more out of politeness than out of any real desire to eat. It tasted like cotton candy, because I wanted it to. I never really like cabbage.

Sarah beamed at me and ate seven helpings.

I eat until I have no more energy to, then I push aside my place. "Thanks," I say.  My plate is still mostly full.

Control wars with love before mom decides to accept I'm still a little damaged from being dead. It isn't being dead that's making me crazy, though; it's all these rules about living. Like eating and opening doors.

"I have a business trip this week. Just a day or two. Are you going to be all right, Kevin?"

Two days out of the few we have left? I eye the angel-warding over the kitchen sink. "Are we really going to do this? Act like nothing happened? Like nothing is _going_ to happen?"

"You want to brood the rest of your life?" She settles her hand warmly over mine.

"What life? I was dead, remember?" I take aim and fire the barb. Her nails dig into my skin like she clawed at the chains on her wrists.

"The life I gave you." Mom is ashen now, quivering as she snatches up my plate. I rise to do the dishes, to relieve her of that burden, at least. "Don't!"

I go still. I went too far. Way too far. It’s my fault this happened. My fault for dying. My fault for leaving Mom to Crowley. All because I became a stupid fucking prophet. My breath comes in choppy bursts again, and I long for the orange shirt even though Mom is right in front of me. "Mom. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Please let me do the dishes?" I don't reach for them until she gifts them to me.

Apart from me, the kitchen is empty as I remember all the motions of washing the dishes. Hot water—which can hurt—and soap. Cleanest dishes first, to keep the water cleaner longer. More than once, a dish slips between my slippery fingers to splash in the water, and I laugh over the soapy froth. The laughter is abrasive as sand.

In some ways, I remain a ghost.

_Day 361_

Sleepless again, I see the moon at its zenith when I boot up the dusty X-box, and Skyrim chants itself into view. The music trickles over my skin as my Redguard loads. I pick mountain flowers and moth wings under the Skyrim moon under the Earth moon and wonder if I could craft a Heaven from Skyrim. The lush landscape, the scenic music, the sense of personal heroism. Instead of a house of memories and mint, I could spend eternity saving Skyrim for the Nords.

I fumble with the fighting controls, my fingers still thick on the controller. But I relax as the wolves fall, and I strip them of their skins. I play long after Skyrim's sun rises and falls again, and long after my own sun is risen.

Ash chose a storming Sunday to sit on my table, his nipples brown and gestured widely beneath the Roadhouse's smoky lighting. "I love the electricity," he drawled at me. "Enough to make anybody feel _alive_."

Since he was a genius, I didn't remind him we were dead, and his memories of storms beating over this simulation couldn't change that. "You able to find Dean yet?" Heaven was sort of lame: there was no good way to see the events below, given that Heaven was all re-runs all the time. Or it was supposed to be. Ash was working on some system to monitor Earth, more or less, but all we knew was that dead Dean was missing, and Sam hunted Crowley.

"Not yet. These things take time, grasshopper." Ash got that distant look of somebody who had been dead too long.

Time was pretty meaningless in Heaven. To make my point, I told them it was Thursday, and so it was.

I expel myself from Skyrim to eat mom's cornflakes. Today, she elects not to eat and instead throws clothes and books into a suitcase. I poke at my cereal with the back of my spoon, and my face hurts as I smile at the way the flakes tirelessly float up again and again.

Being alive is painful and exhausting, but it's also super weird. I forgot to aim while I pissed this morning—such a weird feeling to begin with—and later Mom wanted to know if I "needed to be potty-trained again." I'm not sure if she's serious or not. "Can I borrow your phone?" I ask, now that I'm sure she's not going to frogmarch me to the bathroom. "Please?"

Mom tosses it onto the table. I don't even try to catch.

Sam's number is still programmed in, and I stare at his name. If he's still looking for Crowley, I need to find him, too. Best to work together, right? Mom's going to be no help in saving her soul, since she was the one who sold it away in the first place. So it's up to me.

Maybe I don't have to do it all on my own. Maybe I can count on Sam this time.

The last words I heard used Sam's voice. The last thing I felt was his palm. If I hear his voice, will I panic? Even if what Gadreel said to me in Sam's voice seemed off, I might not be able to distinguish. I don't even know how to tell if I have PTSD or something, or what to do if I do. It’s not like I can just go back to my therapist and tell him about demons and dying and shit.

Mom raises her eyebrows at me, the concern enough to pause her packing. I inhale deeply and wrinkle my nose at the omnipresent paint.

I dial.

Sam picks up three rings in, his voice dragging with exhaustion. "Linda? Is everything—?”

"It's Kevin, Sam." I sound put together enough I could rock debate team right now. "Surprise."

"Kevin? But how? Your mom said you..." He trails off. I lean back in my chair, put at ease by how defeated he sounds. Nothing like Gadreel's purity of purpose.

"Are you still looking for Crowley?" I snap, driven by the sudden curl of guilt in my chest. I shouldn't be relieved he sounds miserable. How shitty is that? "Because I need to find him to. More than anything."

Sam is quiet as someone chokes coughing in the background. Without asking if they're okay, Sam says, "I'm sorry. I didn’t—how long does she have?"

I laugh without humor, latching onto my mother's gaze. No shame softens her features, and I say, "A year. Three hundred and sixty one days." Hell, if he gave me a minute, I could give it to him in _hours_. The hours I have with my mom if I fail at saving her again.

No. No no no. Not this time. I made the mistake of leaving her for dead once. I won't again.

"I'm still looking. Want me to come get you? Bring you to the bunker?" he asks.

Back to the windowless hellhole for me. I take as deep a breath as I can stand. "No. I'll drive out there, after I give mom a lift to the airport. Want me to bring anything?"

"No thanks. You remember where it is?"

Like I could forget. I tell him I do, then disconnect so he can decide which anti-supernatural tests to run on me. Mom remains quiet for a moment, while she takes her phone back. Then, with disapproval dripping, "If you can't wash dishes, you expect me to let you take my car?"

"Please?" I ask, and smile.

Mom shakes her head at me, but she nearly smiles too. When she gives me her keys, I know: she wants me to save her. I close my fingers around hers and the keys. Squeeze just enough she knows it'll be okay.

I'll save her.


	2. Chapter 2

_Day 360_  

I drop Mom off at the airport just before dawn. The sky stretches unbroken over the road as I drive, a dark almost light cloudless sky. I grip the wheel like I remember, and I keep my eyes on the road. Focus is harder than I remember.

My mind wanders endlessly as I obey the GPS, my hands somehow recalling steps I've forgotten. Maybe everything else will get easer, too, with time that has become the most important thing.

I grip the steering wheel tightly. Business. I'm so used to her being _on business_ , and yet her absence settles under my skin like a layer of heavy, scratchy wool.

Crowley already has her. Again, and again. Will there be a day where he doesn't own one or both of us? The car runs hot, the air around me sweltering, and I can smell every stain in sharpened relief. Coffee and artificial cherry, and a hint of blood. My mom's scent hangs over it all. Makes me want to go to her. Hug her. Beg her not to go.

But I can do more for her in the bunker. 

The more road flashes by, the more I feel the distance in my blood. My instincts picks up, my mouth twisting with that rough wooly feeling in my skin, and I take slow breaths through my nose. Mom will be okay, but the protective urge runs deep.

I presented as an alpha when I was fourteen. Presenting was nothing like the movies: no brief seclusion into hot-blooded, gorgeous alpha. No, instead it was weeks of aches and a surly attitude that made Mom scowl at me whenever I crawled out of my room. It was exhaustion so thick I got a C on a history test.

After it was over, I didn’t feel much different.

I could smell better, or differently, and sometimes anger would settle hot-then-cold into my skin, but I don’t know that the second happened just because I was an alpha.

Worse that the double-whammy puberty were the other kids.

Pushing and prodding me to see if I would get angry. (After I got sad, I did.) Asking how much my dick grew. (Liked I’d measured it.) If I still had an _Asian dick_. (Fuck them.) Pinching me to see if I'd learned the deepvoice alpha growl. (Not yet. I practiced in front of the mirror, but thus far it was an uninspiring thing.) Shoving my face into their pits to see what they smelled like. (Like gross high school bullies.) The question: "Still a virgin, _Tran_?" Accompanied by a giggle. (Still am, actually.)

That scorch of anger never left me those days. Betas were always the worst. Other alphas and the omegas seemed to get it, mostly. Though, it was a white omega girl who sized me up, then said smiling, "Since you're an alpha, maybe you actually _could_ be president." Her compliment enough to send me to the nurse's office to cry from a "sick stomach."

Alphas who cried in public at high school opened themselves up for all types of ridicule. I was already full-up on ridicule.

Anger restores itself sharply as worry. As resentment. Crowley, for his refusal to let me go. Except even if he were gone, I doubt I could be free of his haunting. Mom, for valuing my life over herself and her Heaven.

Three-hundred and sixty days, but what does that mean for somebody who forgets the crawl of time?

I try to breathe with resisting lungs. The air—too little, too thin. I have to save her—the universe presses it into me, but the sheer impossibility of the task when she chooses to toss her life away, when Crowley laughs at both of us—I pull off to the shoulder. The wheel digs into my forehead as I bend forward. Familiar warmth swells at my eyes, and this time water falls.

God, but what kind of alpha am I, that I constantly fail her? What kind of son am I? Out of the corner of my eye, I see a black tendril of smoke, and I freeze, before I snake the car back into traffic. I have to keep moving. No choice. Can’t sit and cry.

_Day 359_

If home is Heaven, the bunker is Hell. The door looms before me with Crowley's red gleaming eyes, and I lean against Mom's car. I want to reach into my bag and pull out Mom's orange shirt. Pull the fabric to my nose. Instead, I shake outside as the endless Kansas sun scorches my skin. The heavy, humid air stalls in my lungs.

The bunker is my tomb. Concrete and buzzing with old power, I trusted in the defenses here, only to haunt the dark halls.

As a ghost, I found the bunker alive. The spots where I could feel other consciousnesses that had frayed over time. Tendrils of sentience would reach out to me like they couldn't help it. Once, in Sam's room, I met a consciousness that chilled even my ghostly image. I strained my sense to understand it better—as it wrapped a cool thought around and around my wrist, tugging. "Hey!" I cried out, hoping one of the boys could hear me. Help, somehow.

No, instead the thing—could it have been a spirit like me, trapped for so long everything but desperation had fallen away?—caressed me tightly enough something cold like pain fired through me. I used my other not-hand to reach for the thing, only for it to slip away.

I sat on Sam's bed as the hours passed, until the room's owner staggered through the door with his hair gleaming from sweat, his eyes wide and staring bright and wet. He tossed fitfully through the night while I watched him.

I never knock on the door. The sun sets in a long streak of pink and gold; the car chills against my skin as I watch the door. Sam finally pries it open, and he peers out at me. "Kevin?" His voice has gone harsh and crow-like, as if he hasn't had much cause to speak.

My body stiffens. I come forward slow as I can with the anxiety crawling up from my stomach into my throat. Carefully, I spread my arms. The spray of holy water is expected, and it drips down my skin. Gooseflesh rises up as the wind tears through me. Sam beckons me inside with one arm, and as I enter into the light, I see the grimy sling. His skin is sallow and it hangs off him. Ill-fitting, his flesh is repulsive in the washed-out light.

"Hey," I say, but I shift away from him before I can stop myself. A slow ache is gathering from tensing. "Where's Cas?"

A silver blade presses cool against my already chilled skin, and I shut my eyes as Sam's scent fully surrounds me—unwashed skin, salt, and his sharpsour alpha smell. Last time I smelled Sam... I hold my breath as Sam runs more tests.

Still, his scent fizzes hotly under my skin, and I grit my teeth in irritation as he moves me again. Maybe it’s some base thing, but alphas too far in my space has always made me uncomfortable. “Kevin—“ Sam finally casts aside the knife. "Are you okay?"

Mom's deal hangs around my neck like a noose. "I will be once Crowley's dead."

The knot tightens, and I choke with it. Sam is an alpha, too, he should understand he's shoving me closer to the edge as he stays in my space after all but threatening me.

Trying to calm down, I watch the soft, ashen bob of his throat, instead of the curved palm or his concern-softened face. He swallows, and I feel his discomfort and guilt, and I don't know where to go from here. I've always had a plan. Even before I knew what the world was, I understood it was a dangerous place and tried to make orderly what couldn't be. I stand in the entryway with a noose around my neck and watch the vulnerable throat of the body that killed me.

My forehead remembers the palm. "It's been a long drive," I finally choke out. "I'm kind of tired."

"It _is_ Kevin."

I recognize Castiel by his rasp and flesh, rather than scent. His sick flows over his blandwatery omega scent. His sick nearly blocks out the scent of his host. I curl my fingers into my belt-loops and don't cover my nose at the sick omega smell. The fizzing in my blood pressurizes to boiling, and I take a steadying breath that is more of an angry gasp. Cas's sickness hits something visceral, settling with the feelings Sam's examination left.

"I can feel his restored soul," Cas explains to Sam. "Kevin. It is good to see you again. I have not since... Well. Do you remember your time in Heaven?"

Castiel leaves his gaze on Sam, and the noose strangles the rest of the air from me all at once. I cross to him and gather his dirt-stiffened collar in my hands. What he wants to know is if I remember him. "You liar."

I _do_ remember.

Cas sat uneasily in my Heaven with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in his hands, or whatever the Heavenly equivalent was. It wasn't as if any of us really _had_ hands. We didn’t really have anything, I guess. Except memories. "Thank you," he said as I ate.

I remembered him eating one that day with Sam, while they tracked Gadreel. Trapped in the Veil, I screamed and screamed for them to _stop. Please, please stop_. As he drew out more of Gadreel's Grace, I swore Castiel _saw_ me. But he’d said nothing.

I nodded at Cas as he ate. "You're welcome." Cas's visit, while unexpected, wasn't unpleasant. He didn't tell me to stop working to find a way to protect people from angels.

Hell, I'm practically the sad commercial with the Sarah McLaughlin song warbling in the background for why angel and human relations are whacked. Castiel would likely let me do anything for that reason alone.

In the brief time Cas visited me, I asked him one favor: " _Please look after my mom. I'm afraid she's going to do something to get me back."_

I should stop being surprised. The only time anybody watches out for my mom or me is when it's convenient for them.

Cas flinches back from me, but can't escape my grip. I'm fucking stronger than an angel. Power flashes through me as Sam steps into my space. "Kevin—“ A snarl tears from me even as Sam tries to pull me back. "Kevin!" His heavy alpha voice falls like a rockslide, rather than my mom's blizzard. "Calm down, okay? Cas was just leaving."

The two exchange a look they think I can't see. I want to scream and keep screaming. Fill the stupid haunted bunker with noise. I hate being told to calm down. I _hate_ being told to calm down. Any time, any time I started to get even a little frustrated— _calm down, Kevin_. Even the teachers did that. My mom has said that.

Castiel and Sam treat me like I'm some stupid knothead, but I know. I sat at Ash's monitor as a Wednesday sandstorm beat against the Roadhouse, and I watched the demon throw Sam on the grainy display. Heard the crack. The jagged pain.

I know why Cas is leaving. It's the same reason Cas came to visit me in Heaven. Castiel is dying, and he can't find that redemption he thinks he needs.

Bobby talked a lot about the boys and John and Cas and himself, like he was in a confessional. Personally, I don't see much point in confessing in Heaven. But that's me. I'm not an expert in any this, even if I am a prophet. But the information he gave me serves well: I know what’s going on with Castiel. "You're leaving?" My hands won't stop trembling. 

"Yes. I am sorry. For failing in my promise to you." He nods stiffly to me, like someone starched his sick skin. The door to the bunker closes behind him, leaving me with Sam.

Sam, who gives a tight smile and gets even more into my space like he can't help himself. And normally I wouldn't complain. But I'm tired, and frustrated, and my memory of his skin isn't a memory I care to have. He stills. "Sorry. It's just—good to see you. How about you sleep, then I'll get you caught up, okay?"

"Yeah. Thanks. ...Is my room?"

"Just like you left it."

I'm starting to notice a pattern of people just abandoning my spaces after I died, and I can't decide how I feel about it. Still, the sick feeling settles in and kills my anger.

Before I sleep, I paint angel warding in the spaces between my Devil's Traps. This time, I'll be ready.

_Day 358_

I spread Sam's notes over the stone-engraved Devil's Trap. As I settle on my knees, the floor uncomfortable on my knees, I keep my attention fixed to the work. The dungeon is empty without Crowley to inhabit it, but I can feel him here. I fear I'm not imagining the heady smell of his cologne. I reach blindly for mom's orange shirt. My fingers curl into the gauze, a fingernail dragging over a stiffened sweat stain. 

_~~Leads: Bobby's friend Alexus; Jody; Michael; Rufus's cabin; Dad's contact Julian; Lisa + Ben? NO NO; Hannah~~ _

_Books: The Veil, Denizens of Hell: A Bestiary; Demon Tablet? Kevin's notes_

The list goes on and on, and I can pinpoint when his arm broke from when his handwriting unravels. I set aside the copy of Sam's list, to replace it with _The Veil_. Blue leather covers stained with what I assume is lamp oil. I part the book and let myself get pulled into the pages. What Sam hopes to find about Dean in a book on the Veil is beyond me, but, like normal, I don't really question. I keep reading. 

_The Veil exists as a realm between this and another. Spirits of all types are said to inhabit it, though whether these spirits are cognizant of one another is highly disputed._

_It is thought that the Veil is linked to the physicality of Earth, because the majority of spirits seen are able to interact with reality in some way. The exact nature of the Veil remains an enigma, though spirits that remain too long eventually go mad. Those caught within the Veil are as beasts._

I shut the book with frustration and disgust. It’s a relief to cross the title off the list. Useless fluff about something you can’t understand unless you’ve been there. I spent enough time in the Veil to know I’ll gladly follow my reaper when my time comes again.

Endless. The Veil was endless, with smoke-screen images of the bunker always just out of reach. Cries of anguish filled the Veil—all of us trying to shout over each other. To understand our situation. To find our loved ones. I had more answers than most, but I used my voice to find Mom rather than calm others. Death makes everyone selfish, whether the threat or the reality of it.

In all my screaming, I attracted a reaper to me. She appeared as a white woman with hanging dark hair. Behind the image, though, I saw her six pale eyes staring at me without lids. The jumble of faces that ran together. Her glimmering, ashen talons. “Kevin Tran,” she said, some tenderness in her tone that reminded me of my mother. My fear melted the way all feelings except anger tended to. “I am Tessa.”

“Heaven’s still shut. You can’t take me,” I pointed out. I’m pretty sure everyone in the Veil can recognize a reaper when they see one.

Tessa settled herself on Sam’s bed, a ten-fingered hand stroking over that consciousness I met earlier. It made some soft shrieking sound. “You’re right. How are you holding up?”

A welfare check from a reaper. Awesome. I guessed it wasn’t like she had anything better to do. This Heaven thing had put her out of a job. A job she’d done since forever, probably. I sort of felt bad for her as she just sat and pet the twisted soul. “It’s frustrating. I keep trying to make contact with the boys, but I’m not strong enough or loud enough. I need them to find where Crowley’s goons are keeping her.”

“Still holding on so tightly.” Tessa’s human image smiled at me without humor. She was probably used to that. “Is death as bad as you feared? You spent so long avoiding it, without understanding what you were running from.”

“Well, I’m not totally, actually dead, right? The Veil _is_ that bad, but until I move on, it’s not official, right?” My voice sounded breathless even though I didn’t breathe anymore, but my desperation surprised even me.

Tessa laughed. “No. You are _officially_ dead. The Veil is where you wait. If you wish to withhold judgement until…” She faltered, then was silent.

I didn’t press her. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. The thing under her hand dissipated, and I never saw it again. Finally, she said, “If you could help explain the situation to the others, I would appreciate it, prophet. They might listen to one of their own. That’s your purpose, isn’t it?”

With careful hands, I gather everything up. Time to vacate the dungeon. Tessa wasn’t wrong—being dead wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I might be one of the only people ever to make friends after I’d gone to Heaven.

I saw more people in my time in Heaven than I had in the last three years I spent on Earth.

I miss them. Sarah and Ash, and Jo and Ellen, and Rufus, and Bobby and Victor, and all of the others I met. I miss Channing. But my mom is here. I definitely am not going to toss away my life again.

Heaven will always be there. Or, I hope it will be. I don’t know that it could survive another Civil War.

“Kevin?” I startle at Sam’s voice. He smells clean: sour, alpha, and cheap citrus soap. His hair hangs wet and heavy in his face, and I frown, realizing he took the time to shower. Before I came, it had obviously been awhile. I feel myself smile even as I clutch the books and papers tighter. “I made breakfast,” Sam says, watching me with heavy eyes.

“Thanks. I’m starving.”

Scrambled eggs and blackened sausage and white toast. He offers me a plate with his good hand. “Thanks,” I say again, all I can say, even as I want to scream he doesn’t have to take care of me. I don’t want his guilt anymore than I wanted Dean’s.

But seeing his guilt, watching him now—I have to wonder. Bobby told me about Lucifer, and Sam’s cage-fight with him. To save Dean, he wrenched control from Satan himself—but he couldn’t save me from a lesser angel?

Why?

No—no. Can’t think about that. I have to let it go.

Sam almost smiles as me, but I can smell the start of his sweat even over the food. He stares at his own plate as he eats clumsily. Unlike Mom, Sam doesn’t watch me eat. It’s nice not to have an audience, but now I’m Sam’s audience. In some ways, Sam is so like my mother—caring and guilty, making me food that it stills seems weird to eat. “You don’t have to take care of me, you know,” I say, some of that alpha sharpness sneaking into my tone before I can stop it. Great. Now I look like an asshole.

“I know.” Without rising to the bait. Sam looks at me through his bangs. His cheekbones stand out sharp as his knives with all the weight he’s lost. “I want to. Let me have this. Please. Cas won’t let me, and after what happened to you, I feel…”

“It wasn’t your fault.” The words come automatically, even if I’m not that convincing.

If one or both of us believes he’s to blame, my platitudes won’t mean anything. I fork burnt sausage into my mouth and watch as Sam does the same. “Sam, seriously. I’m more worried about my mom and Crowley, you know? And I watched you. When I was dead. I’m pretty sure you already did your self-flagellation bullshit. Anyway, what good does it do me, for you to feel bad? Let’s just focus on Crowley, right?” My words come out a jumbled, half-formed disaster that I can’t seem to put together. I watched him grieve me. I watched him grieve the relationship with Dean. I watched Dean grieve. I’m tired of it. I’m so exhausted with my life and death being worth something different to everyone I see, without ever getting a chance to talk about what it meant to me. Even though both of them should belong to me. “Honestly, I just wish I’d realized something was wrong with you earlier. But—we can’t go back.”

That won’t help Sam get over it, either. If it’s one thing Heaven taught me, it’s that people will make the same mistakes over and over.

Sam smiles more like a grimace, pushing aside his plate. “I won’t forget. Our priority is finding them.”

He rises without his usual grace. Without Dean, Sam is like a movie that keeps skipping at your favorite part. I watch him approach, holding myself perfectly still as his arm comes up, and I see the pale curve of his palm. I don’t breathe.

His hug is slow and deliberate, built with plenty of time for me to escape. I pull Sam down further, gentle with his broken side. His soursharp scent fills my senses, with the citrus barely clinging to the edges. Mom says my scent is mild and pleasant, but I’m pretty sure every mom has to say that. Plus, she probably wasn’t talking about when I’m stressed and haven’t showered in a day. I hug him tightly for a long time.

Then, his scent digs too deeply into my skull, and I have to let him go. Once we part, I notice the sharp cut of his jaw, framed by wispy-dried strands of hair. “I’m glad you’re here,” he tells me, retreating with the dishes.

I call after, “It’s good to see you!”

It’s even true. 

_Day 356_

My comforter rubs against my skin as I settle on top of my bed, naked and still warm-damp from my shower. I trail my fingertips over my leg, to prod at the assortment of bruises as I go. Some healing waxy yellow, some spotted purple black, some great lumps.

I forget my body, still. A nasty red black bruise at my hip hurts as I press it. I hip-checked the oven trying to cook yesterday. The nice burn on my right palm is its counterpart. I pull on a clean set of clothes: jeans and a striped pink and blue shirt that smell strongly of clean detergent. So strong a beta could smell it, probably.

I head to the door and remember first try to turn the knob. I’m getting good at this.

Two days, and we haven’t found anything. All Sam’s leads are cold. All the books are useless. All the tablets are gone. Two days, and the walls of the bunker creep ever inward. The lamps sing as we work, their constant buzzing so irritating I consider shattering them all. That’s one thing that would have been easier to do while I was in the Veil. Sam is no help when I imagine a blue flash to his eyes, and I forget to breathe.

Why couldn’t he stop Gadreel?

It’s too easy to forget I’m not trapped here. That Mom is alive. That I can and will save her.

When I get like that, Sam retreats quietly as a broken giant can. I pull Mom’s shirt to my nose after he leaves, but I noticed yesterday her scent was starting to fade. It’s the only thing that reminds me that things are different now, when the bunker crawls inside me.

I enter the library to find Sam. He smiles in greeting, even as he curls tighter around his book, his skin grey from pain and insomnia. Probably, he’s afraid I’ll be snippy with him again, but my attention isn’t on him anymore. No, my gaze is drawn to the hang of orange gauze on one of the chairs. Mom’s shirt still is damp from its washing, and I can smell the generic detergent from where I stand. Her scent totally gone.

My face and skin heat up fast, like stepping from icy air into a hot tub. As I lift the shirt into my hands, Sam tells me from faraway, “I hand-washed it, since that’s what the tag said. I think it’s your mom’s?”

I put the fabric to my nose, the gauze rubbing sharply against my skin. Soap soap soap soap. Cheap fucking soap. God, it must have been a pain to wash it one-handed—he probably couldn’t get all the stupid detergent out before his shoulder hurt too bad.

The floor catches me as I sit. Crumple. This is so stupid, so so stupid. Because of a shirt. But I can’t breathe through the wet fabric. I have to yank it away, and my vision is blurring as I feel myself shouting. I’m not ever sure it’s English. It could be Enochian or my broken Vietnamese or stray vocab from that semester of Spanish I took. It could be nothing.

I shout at Sam as I hold the shirt so tightly I’m distantly afraid I’m going to tear it, but I can’t loosen my grip anymore than I can stop yelling.

This is awful and stupid. Unforgivable. Just a dirty shirt. But I hear myself, finally, screaming, “You should have asked me, first! Just asked me!” Sam winces under my onslaught, looking small. I feel big and little all at once, to make him cower. I can’t stop. I can’t—

Sam comes closer, and I flinch—flinch! Finally, the words stall in my throat, and I start crying. These shaking sobs that carry me along with them. I cry into the clean, flimsy shirt. Sam, wearing the body that was the murder weapon, crouches in front of where I’m still a useless heap.

His expression is pinched and rat-like, but gentle, as if I’m deserving of pity after exploding about a shirt. “Kevin.” He catches my chin in one of his huge hands. “Hey. Kevin, it’s all right. You’re right—I shouldn’t have assumed you weren’t keeping it around for a reason. I’m sorry.”

I try to bury my face into the shirt, but he keeps me looking at him. “I’m sorry,” I murmur, “I’m so sorry. It was gross and bad, and I just—Heaven smelled like mint, and when I woke up, I smelled dust and my mom. I want to forget she’s going to die, but I have to save her. Except I keep forgetting this is really real. I’m sorry I yelled. The shirt, it needed to be washed. I’m sorry.” I’m babbling. Throwing still more words at Sam. Sam, who is hurting too, hurting worse without Dean or Cas, and I make it worse. I always make it worse.

“Kevin, we’ll fix this. For now, just breathe. This is real, I promise.” Sam pauses, fingers tightening on my jaw enough I might have more bruises to add to my collection if he holds any tighter. “I understand. When I came back from Hell, I saw Lucifer everywhere. Heard him. Smelled him.” He looks through me, like the Devil is at my back. Maybe our fears aren’t so different. “I had this scar on my palm I squeezed whenever I saw him, and he’d disappear. It was the only thing that worked. One day, Cas healed it without asking me first. It didn’t matter I’d stopped seeing Lucifer by that point. The fact it was gone—I questioned reality for a long time after that. If I had known…” Sam sighs, his shoulders drooping, and his hand falling away from me. “I wanted to do something for you. I know better than that.”

I drop the shirt and grab his good shoulder. “I—thanks for the thought. I’m still not all right. But I’m trying.” Honestly, I don’t know if I really am thankful or not. But I want to make up for yelling at him.

Sam picks up the discarded shirt and hands it to me. “I think you should go back to Neighbor,” he says as my stomach curls up like a snail into its shell. One stupid outburst and he wants me to go. Not that I blame him. The tears try to resurface again. “Kevin. The door here is always open for you, when you want it. Trust me, I know what it’s like. The year before Dean’s deal came due, I never wanted to leave his side. But there were days if I didn’t get away from him, I’d’ve dug my own eyes out. Do what you need to do. I’ll be here, looking for Dean and Crowley.”

“Thanks,” I say, as I try to breathe and not cry. “I’ll keep looking once I get home. I just need to make sure she’s okay.”

He pulls me to my feet. I look up at his drawn face. His expression gentles, and for just a moment, I see the boy Bobby described beneath this shell. I see the caring, scared boy who ran away to college to be safe. Then he’s gone again. I thank him again in a soft voice, and he just tells me to go pack while he checks the oil of Mom’s car.

That, I let him do for me, even though I can do it myself. I pack Mom’s shirt at the bottom of my bag.


	3. Chapter 3

_Day 355_

Mom is sleeping when I get in, as most reasonable people are at three a.m. I toss aside my duffle and take some steadying breaths, my pulse still thrumming in my throat like a fist. My eyes itch. My hands tremble.

I settle on the couch to watch the stars from the window, and I should go play Skyrim or read or something, anything that isn’t sitting on this couch while I fumble for breath. Exhaustion makes me heavy, but I want to see her, see my mom, but I’d be an asshole if I woke her. Regardless, I lurch to my feet, taking the couch pillow and throw with me.

When I was a kid, nights trapped in my own head were the worst. Wondering about my dad. Wondering about why my mom was sad all the time. Wondering what would happen if there was a fire in my room while I slept. Wondering what would happen if I got a bad grade on my next spelling test. Worrying and worrying. After I hit seven, I wasn’t allowed to sleep with her anymore.

So instead I spread my covers over the floor outside her door and slept like I was dead.

I curl up in the familiar hallway with my arms wrapped around the pillow. Her door looms shut and silent. There are words for twenty-year-old alpha men who can’t leave their mothers, words coined by Freud and beta teenagers, but I decide I don’t care. They don’t know me or my Mom. What we’ve been through. Are going through.

Sam, of everyone, would probably understand best. My stomach seizes with guilt. I pull out my phone on reflex and shoot off a text: _I’m sorry, again._ Then I put my silenced phone under the pillow.

Sleep takes me easily now.

It’s the proximity to her that allows me to sleep, and then the proximity that wakes me with the pierce of her screams. I hear her thrashing in the room. Smell the heat-salt of her sweat. Without knocking, I push open the door to find my mother frail and trembling. Her eyes are dark as she finally sees me. “Kevin?”

I am solid, a gargoyle in her doorway.

But her tears continue, and I recall all those nights she spent crying when she thought I couldn’t hear. On the phone with my Aunt Tammy, words tumbling out of my mother in a rush—“without David, this is so hard. How do you and Daniel do it?”—and whatever Aunty Tammy said, it just made Mom cry harder. Talking to my aunt always made Mom like that, probably because Tammy was dad’s sister. Which was probably also why we rarely saw her. That, and Oregon was a long drive from Michigan.

“Mom—“ There aren’t words. It won’t be okay. She goes to Hell in 354 days. Her nightmares are probably memories. All I can do is hold out my arms to see if she wants a hug. “I’m sorry.” It’s the best I can come up with. After all, this all happened because I became a prophet.

She buries her face in my shoulder, clutching me tight enough I feel the bite of her nails. Mom has always been the center of my world. Even with everything, that hasn’t changed. In a way, it’s _more_ true. I inhale her warmth deeply. “Hot chocolate?” I ask.

Her smile in my shoulder is relieving. A verification of our ritual. Together, we go downstairs, and she watches as I heat the milk. Pushed into the far back cupboard, I find the old container of mint hot chocolate. 

“I missed this,” I say, as I hand her a mug of chocolate. “I could never recreate this in Heaven. I tried, but it just—it wasn’t you.” I figured eventually Mom would die, and I would see her again in Heaven, and we could keep going together like we always had. Mom selling her soul and bringing me back really messed up my plan. Messed up everything. Guilt and anger twist sharply, till I can hardly tell the two apart. “I missed you,” I say, so thickly that I gulp my chocolate and burn my throat. My tears are hidden in that pain.

Mom doesn’t have to say she missed me. After all, she sold everything of herself for one last year. She traded our eternity for moments like this, and I can’t hate her for it. I can’t even blame her, really. I might have done the same in her shoes.

I might do the same, when it comes down to it.

I drink as she surveys me, her own eyes to bright and wet. It takes everything not to abandon my chocolate for her arms. But I am still selfish. That selfish kid with the pudgy fingers tangled in the laces of her shoes as she tells me over and over we’re going to be late to my meeting with the child therapist. “Will you read to me?” I ask, like I’m the one in need of comfort. “Or, I could read to you?”

Mom pulls out her book from her purse that she left on the counter. “I’ll start from the beginning.” She’s always had a low opinion of people who skip to the end in books. I wonder if her opinion is changing at all. I grin at her.

_ “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay _

_By Michael Chabon._

_Part 1: The Escape Artist_

_In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. "To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angouleme or to the editor of Comics Journal. "You weren't the same person when you came out as when you went in. Houdini's first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started. It was called 'Metamorphosis: It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation." The truth was that, as a kid, Sammy had only a casual interest, at best, in Harry Houdini and his legendary feats; his great heroes were Nikola Tesla, Louis Pasteur, and Jack London. Yet his account of his role—of the role of his own imagination—in the Escapist's birth, like all of his best fabulations, rang true. His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.”_

My mom tells stories as briskly as she does everything else. The inflections are mostly jagged, bring a sharpness to the story that soothes me. At the same time, somehow, Mom softens the characters. Mom pulls life into them with her quick words, and her hard-won understanding of others that I’d never mastered, even before I became a dead hermit. I sit on the floor at her feet to better imagine the escape. To her smell her tacky sweat and know her terror tonight is past. To sip my hot chocolate and imprint this moment to my memory. Maybe then I can recreate it. Maybe I can keep this memory. Keep this moment.

I smell linen.

Mom reads till the sun rises, and our hot chocolate is long drained. Her fingers card through my hair. “Movie day?” she asks me, with an airiness I don’t buy.

But I want the normality, so I don’t call her on it. I don’t honestly know how either of us keep going, but here we are. I won’t complain about that. Not when I get to see her. She lays out on the couch her her head in my lap. I drag the plush throw over her as we scroll through Netflix’s International movies. Some movie about Africa actually about Africans starts up.I relax into the cushions and smooth Mom’s hair out. Her breathing evens out barely ten minutes in, and I watch her face go slack. I finally see her relaxed. I stroke my thumb over a particularly prominent sheaf of silver hairs.

I shouldn’t miss her before she’s gone. I shouldn’t miss her at all because I’m going to save her.

I’m afraid of messing up. Of losing her again. Still, this life we built before barely suits the people we’ve become, and I can hardly be a person at all most days.

Knifing Crowley won’t make either of us whole, at this point. 

Mom rouses an hour later as sweat drips down her face. “Kevin?” She catches my face in her hands. “You’re still here? Oh, _Kevin_.”

I pull her up into a hug before she can start crying. “It’s okay, Mom. I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.” I don’t know whether or not I should make promises like that, but I just want her to be okay. More than anything else, I want her to be okay.

“I missed you. More than anything,” she muffles into my shoulder.

“It should have been my choice. Losing you was never worth—“

“This is _my_ choice. Kevin, please, please not this now. I want to spend my time with you. Please don’t fight me.” Steely words at odds with her trembling.

I want to hold her tighter and tighter, but I’m afraid of hurting more than I already have.

_Day 349_

I spend my nights sleeping outside Mom’s room. She doesn’t wake violently every night, but often enough we make good progress on our book. Sometimes, I read unsteadily till my voice cracks, but mostly she reads. 

Despite my vigils, I find her at breakfast with a packed roller bag. She must have stepped over me this morning without waking me. Maybe sleeping is becoming easier for me. I can’t decide if that’s good or bad: after all, if she can get out, does that mean something could get in? “Where is it this week?” I ask, unable to keep the bite from my words. Too tired to really care.

“Seattle. Just for a two-day consultation trip. I’ll be back before you know I’m gone.” Unlikely, given I’m measuring time in how many months, weeks, days, hours she has left.

Mom smiles at me, but she looks uneasy as she nibbles her toast. I do nothing to make her feel better as the silence stretches onward for a few minutes. Then, when I can’t stand my curiosity, my frustration, my loss anymore, I ask, finally, the stupid question with the obvious answer, “Why do you keep doing this?”

“Kevin.” I hunch at her testy alpha growl. “I can’t sit on my hands. The company does good work, and Julia was kind enough to give me this flexible consulting job after _everything_. Besides—“ she halts, watching me for some sign. I don’t know that I give her what she wants, but she continues, “Working will help bolster my savings and it allows me to keep my life insurance.”

My skin flashes cold-then-hot, my distant hands falling away from hers. That’s what it would be about. Pragmatism. Protection. Money. Often, they’re the same thing.

I can’t get a sense of her. Does she want me to save her? Or does she want to make this deal happen? Is she just preparing for the worst? I push aside my toast. “Have a nice trip. Call me when you get in.” My words are like cardboard, but Mom just watches me head to the door.

I want her to follow me, but she won’t. She won’t play this sullen game with me, and I can’t blame her.

The streets look the same as they did in Heaven. So much so, I half-expect to see Pamela or Victor coming over to see me. Instead, I sit at a park bench and watch the morning spread over the horizon. Channing and I used to like this bench. We loved this park. We’d come here and study on the weekends. Hit our knuckles on the monkey bars that were bigger when we were younger. My phone vibrates. Mom’s text reads: _I took a cab in case you wanted the car. I love you. See you soon._

_You too_ , I shoot back.

I see my high school friend, Red, come jogging into the park, and I slip away before she sees me. I’m not ready. I may never be. Whoever I am now, it is nothing like the dreaming sixteen year old I was.

_Day 348_

When I enter the bunker, the harsh smell of alcohol hits my nose before Sam’s scent does. It reminds me of Dean, those last few weeks of my life, when Dean would drink and drink like the world was ending. He drank the further steeped in his own deception he became. Deception neither Sam nor I saw. Deception that resulted in my death. I find Sam hunched over the table. His mouth shines with whiskey. “Kevin. I smelled you.” The words are over-articulated and purposeful. Overcompensating. My throat aches for him. “You didn’t call.”

“Sorry. I needed to get away from Neighbor.” I clutch the car keys tighter. The teeth dig into my skin.

Sam drinks. Brushing aside his unwashed bangs, Sam regards me for a long while. I twitch under the scrutiny, already I am sharp and brittle from everything with my mom and the anxious loneliness of the road. His gaze makes my skin prickle uncomfortably, like when I used to clean the resin off my cello strings. It feels like that sound. “It’s got to be a trap. The deal with your mom; we know that Crowley is more interested in you.” Sam’s scrutiny shifts to his drink.

I pick at my cuticles till it hurts. He’s not telling me anything I don’t already know. I’m not stupid. I know Crowley wants something from me. “You think I care?” My voice breaks. “I know you understand. You know why I have to find him. She’s my mom, Sam. I’m not damning her to Hell. No way.” He watched his brother go to Hell for him. He knows.

Shit, he knows what Hell is like, after his time with the Devil. He knows better than I do what will happen to my mom. All I have to go on is what I read in the tablet and what Bobby described to me.

Sam offers me the whiskey, and I drink. The bottle is still wet from his mouth. “Just because I understand doesn’t make it the right choice,” he says, “But we’ll find him. For your mom. For Dean.”

He relieves me of the booze to take a swig himself. His throat works desperately, that need for any kind of relief a feeling I know all too well. On my turn, I drink till I sputter and it still isn’t enough. Throat aching, I put my hand over the curve of his sharp wrist. “I’m sorry for last time. I didn’t mean to go ballistic on you.”

The warmth of the whiskey is soothing as Sam watches me drink, his brows bunched together and a bright flush to his cheeks. But his glassy eyes still are heavy. I am not the only one suffering. “I know. You’ve sure got that alpha temper.” He shakes his head, smiling. “But you smell good. Sort of strong and metallic. It’s good.”

Heat climbs my cheeks. I drink more and more. “I’m trying to control my temper. I hate letting it control me, or whatever.”

“What, don’t want to be a standard knothead?”

The next mouthful is especially bitter. “No. No, I don’t.”

His smile falls, but I keep my hand over his as we drink long into the night.

_Day 347_

I wake with a dry mouth and pounding head; I sit unsteadily and am relieved at the lack of sun.

Back when I lived here, I missed the sunlight more I dreamed possible. In high school, I was one of those kids who used to joke about being a vampire and hating the sun, without understanding what a horrible thing it would be to miss. Now, I see it enough I’m allowed to hate it sometimes.

Better than no light is coffee. I stagger to the kitchen and find the coffeepot gleaming innocently, and it figures that was the first thing I’d been able to manipulate upon dying.

That was the funny thing about being a ghost. The longing. After the novelty of being dead wore off, I found myself wanting: first, the comforting weight of blankets against my skin; then, coffee. As I pushed myself against the Veil again and again, trying to tell Sam and Dean that I was trapped, I found death to be exhausting.

The harder I struggled to be heard, the more it sapped me.

One night as I watched Sam try to sleep, I felt myself begin to unravel. A coil of anger rose in me so urgently, and I suddenly wanted coffee. But when I came into the kitchen and tried to turn on the pot, nothing happened. It sat dusty.

There are so many tiny indignities to death. The lack of coffee was one.

The coffee is bitter and stale, and it sits on my tongue before I can choke it down. My memory of coffee was better than this shit. I sigh with annoyance born of my hangover. I’ll bring better coffee with me next time.

I’m halfway through the pot, with my stomach gurgling its protest, when Sam enters. I smell him before I see him—soursweatbooze—but he looks worse than he smells. Bags under his eyes. Hair standing up like the protagonist of a JRPG.

“Thanks,” he mumbles as I hand him a cup. Drinks it without a grimace, making me look like a snob. “I’m going to hit the books.”

So much for not sprinting. Then again, the brothers throw out all the rules when it comes to each other. Probably why so many people got caught in the crosshairs. I remember sitting in the Roadhouse with the others. I remember their stories, and the days we spent drowning our sorrows in imaginary booze that never helped. Stories that eventually added up to the boys unwittingly causing the death of everyone around them. Dean’s inability to trust me, coupled with Sam’s inability to tear Gadreel out of his skin. Those were my sentences.

No. No. Blame does me no good. I don’t blame them. It’s because I am a prophet. It has nothing to do with anyone else.

The familiar resentment rises under my skin. “I miss the resources I had in Heaven.” I grab the dusty book on medieval western European demon lore. “If I wanted it—poof. In my hands. No running around. No shitty internet connection. My ass never fell asleep. I didn’t have to eat or shower.” Heaven is simpler in a lot of ways. I never thought I’d miss it, but the march of time is claustrophobic as my mother’s deal looms over like a carrion bird.

Sam looks up from his book, eyes narrowed in thought. “Sometimes, I miss being dead, too.” His cheek flexes with some memory. Something in his expression tells me I shouldn’t have brought it up. “Your reasons are better than mine.”

“Are they?” I’m amazed he can hear me with how quiet I am. This is something I’m not sure I want to know, but I have to ask. It’ll drive me insane, otherwise.

The laptop steals his attention again. Something in Latin I can’t read. Eventually, he explains, “Lucifer could be charming when he chose. Sometimes it feels like things aren’t necessarily better here than in the Cage.”

I stop my hand in the space between us before I can touch him. There is no comfort I can give. Nothing I can do. The Cage. If it was even half as bad as Bobby described hell to me— _“demon with Sam’s face came in with some kind of chain, and damn if he didn’t have the boy’s smile as he strung me up.” Yeah,_ I told Bobby, _I know a little what that’s like_. More than one of my demons wears Sam's face. That Sam is longing for something along the lines of what Bobby described to me is… I can’t think of any comfort for that.

“I’m glad you’re here.” I settle on. Stick with the truth and don’t apologize. Don’t tell Sam’s he’s crazy, even if it might be true. Hell, I’m crazy myself.

Sam jolts to look at me, surprise passing over his face like a current. “…Thanks.” He frowns at his book and doesn’t look at me as he says, “I’m glad you’re here, too. Even considering the circumstances. And I’m sorry for that.”

We read with near impeccable focus after that. I can’t help glancing at him once in a while, though, and I tell myself it’s just to ensure his shoulder isn’t hurting too bad. Lying to myself is such a great skill to have.

Maybe I _should_ be angry at Sam, and not just alpha-whatever angry, but actually effort-induced angry. Not about killing me. I don’t blame him for killing me anymore than I’d blame a gun if I had been shot. (Except a gun can’t tear free of its master’s hand, and Sam has before.) I feel shitty to make the comparison, but not because the analogy isn’t apt.

Maybe I should be mad about Sam’s part in leaving my mom for dead. But in that, I’m equally, if not more, culpable.

Really, though, I should be furious with Sam for abandoning the Trials. Thinking about it still leaves this acidic clawing in my stomach. I can’t parse out what I feel or how I should feel about it. After everything, it seems so distant, but the truth is that if Sam had completed the Trials, Mom couldn’t have sold her soul on some crossroads. After losing Mom and Channing, after Sarah’s death—which she recounted for step by step one Saturday while she made couscous—Sam still just quit. He left the Gates open.

I just can’t hate him or judge him too harshly for wanting to live. It was his price to pay or not pay. I would have saved my own skin too, probably.

Or maybe, in the end, I’m just happy not to have his blood my hands.

 

I pretend Sam doesn’t notice my frequent glances at him. Despite all the heavy complications between us, it _is_ true. I am glad he’s here. Sam Winchester remains one of a handful of people that cares about me as person rather than a chess piece, even if he does a shitty job of it. Call me desperate, but it a relief to be liked. Distracting, even, because I want the attention and companionship.

I don’t even care too much that Sam’s another alpha. It’s actually a point of interest, if I’m being honest with myself. I haven’t really had the opportunity to talk frankly with other male alphas, not with our hormones going ballistic. He's pretty much the first other alpha man I've had extended contact with. 

“Hey, Sam?” I twist to look at him full-on. He looks back indulgently, but his jaw is tense—have-to-find-Dean tense. “So… Did people use to give you shit about the alpha thing?”

“At school? A little. ‘How big is your dick. Smell me.’ The normal bullshit.” He combs his good hand through his hair. “Honestly, Dean and dad were worse. Dad was a beta, and Dean wa—is an omega, you know. I think were jealous, but they used to be jerks about it. ‘Alphas can’t cry. Suck it up. You should have been born with the pussy. Don’t take that tone with me, boy.’ They wanted me to be what they thought the perfect alpha was. When I wasn’t… By then, I was used to be the freak of the family.” He spits the word freak like he can’t get it out fast enough.

“I’ve always hated being an alpha,” I tell him, sharply. “People used to ask me if, since I was a knothead, if I had a _normal_ sized cock. You know, because Asian-alpha? Ha ha.” Once, this group of white boys decided they’d check in the locker room. I escaped by telling the coach I was sick and going to the nurses’s office. “And dudes always accused me of trying to steal their girlfriends, even after I was dating Channing.”

Sam grimaces. “I’m sorry. That’s—tough. I may hunt monsters, but people will get you every time.” He is thoughtful as he idly taps his fingers on the keyboard. “If you ever get the chance and you want to… College is a good place to figure out what it means to you. I took a class on Scenting and Society my freshman year, and it was amazing. I learned a lot, and it was a constructive space to dig into how I felt about being an alpha. Try googling performativity some time, to start. See what you think.”

College seems like such a crazy concept now, even though it was basically everything I dreamed of in middle and high school. Now, I don’t even have my high school diploma and the likelihood of my ever getting one seems slim. Is Mom disappointed in me? That now I’m alive again, I haven’t tried to fit more neatly into our old life, like she has?

I jot down the search term in my notes, then resume my Middle English march.

_Day 346_

_Palm. Sam’s face, eyes blue with Grace, can he see me behind them? Will he remember this later? Oh God—bright bright light, burning—_

I wake in the bunker with my chest seizing. I hate memory-nightmares the most. Everything hurts as I roll out of bed, and the clock says it’s three in the morning. As ever, the bunker is quiet. Empty halls walked by mostly dead men, including me. _The bright flash of light as Sam’s palm_ —I brace myself against the wall. Breathe, Kevin. Shit, shit. I’m already most of the way down the hall when I realize I left the new dirty shirt I borrowed from Mom back in my room. A blue flowery thing I bought her with my birthday money.

I want my mom. I want to make sure she’s okay. I want to make sure this is real. But first, I go the rest of the way to Sam’s room. First, I have to make sure Sam’s okay. I have to make sure Sam is Sam. That Sam is safe, and all that implies.

I carefully push the door open, and there he is, sleeping. This is familiar, watching Sam sleep. Though, it seems creepier now that I’m solid. His fingers curl over the handle of his gun. The angel wards in his room are undisturbed and crimson. I take a shuddering breath.

I slip away before I wake him.

Mom picks up on the second ring. I can tell from her thin voice she hasn’t slept either. “Kevin? Is everything all right?”

“Yeah. I just want—“ I pull the book out of my duffle. “I miss you.” I need to go back home soon. The bunker is driving me mad. Sam is driving me mad. The questions are driving me mad—what does Crowley want? Why couldn’t Sam stop Gadreel? Why am I here? “I brought _Kavalier & Clay_ with me. Could I read some to you?”

I can feel her soften all the way in Seattle, and it makes me relax. “Please do.”

“The last letter that Joe was ever to receive from his mother,” I begin…

_“I have not had word from you for three months, and while I am certain that you continue to write faithfully, I take this silence however unintentional as a suggestion. In all likelihood this letter will not find you but if you are reading this, then please. Listen to me. I want you to forget us, Josef, to leave us behind once and for all. It is not in your nature to do so, but you must. They say that ghosts find it painful to haunt the living, and I am tormented by the idea that our tedious existence should dim or impair your enjoyment of your own young life. That the reverse situation should obtain is fair and proper, and you cannot imagine how I delight in picturing you standing on some bright, busy street corner in that city of freedom and swing music.”_

I clear my throat to keep reading—my heart feels thick in my throat—only to see Sam watching from the doorway. He smiles tiredly, nodding at me to continue. I’m swept up with self-consciousness, and I stumble as I read to my mom and Sam. I finish the chapter to find my throat scratchy from effort. “I think I need to go grab some water, so I’m going to go. When are you getting back?” I ask her.

“The day after tomorrow. Do you plan on being home?”

“Yeah. I love you.” My voice tightens again. “Thanks, Mom.”

“You too, honey.” She disconnects. The book falls from my trembling hands. _They say that ghosts find it painful to haunt the living_. It _was_ painful to haunt them. To have Mom carry around the ring with her fragile hands. To try and fix the problems between the boys, and have those tight, accommodating smiles turned at me. Is it so different now? For all that I’m technically alive again, am I still a ghost? Am I still haunting them? It hurts like I am.

“Did I wake you?” I ask Sam suddenly. Opening the door to creep on him was probably not the best plan I ever had.

“I’m a light sleeper.” He grimaces as he rubs his broken shoulder. Must have slept on it wrong. “Did you need something?”

God, now I just feel like an asshole. Of course Sam wasn’t possessed. Who could possess him now? “Just making sure you were okay.” Sort of the truth. But I don’t want to get into it.

It’s one of the many things between us that happened that talking about won’t solve. Gadreel will always have taken Sam’s body and killed me with it. Sam will always have hit a dog and missed my messages. I will always have dropped the Trials on Sam’s lap without understanding the price I was asking him to pay. Nothing we can say will ever change these things. They’re immutable. So I tell him part, but not all, of my concern.

“I’m all right. Sore. When are you going back to Neighbor?”

“Day after tomorrow. I think I’ll hit the internet today. See if I can find some link to Dean or Crowley.” It turns out that hiding from Crowley was substantially easier than finding him. Go figure.

_Day 345_

Time in the bunker passes without much fanfare. I would probably forget about it entirely if I didn’t feel my mom slipping away from me. The clock tells me it’s five in the evening when I hand Sam a bowl of hamburger egg noodle soup I made.

Cooking is a skill I learned from necessity, since Mom traveled so often, and she generally was pretty tired once she got home from work anyway. Channing and Mom both used to tell me I was a good cook, but who knows whether or not it was bias talking.

Sam smiles, some tired, half-smile as he accepts the food. “Thanks. There wasn’t much in the kitchen… Sorry, I just haven’t…”

“It’s fine.”

I sit beside him at one computer, while he works at the other; we eat the soup I made—it’s too water, with only ground hamburger, old spices, egg noodles, and corn. But I settle. My chest is light, and for the first time, I let myself relax in this stupid bunker.

After I finish eating, I peer over Sam’s shoulder to read about omens in South Carolina. We aren’t so different, Sam and me. Not really. Driven, especially when it comes to our families. The obvious academic parallels. Our distaste for alpha machismo crap. We’re similar even if there’s so much of his life that’s too much for me to grasp, despite everything I’ve seen. We’re similar even if his view of people is now so fundamentally skewed, I can’t tell what he sees when he looks at me.

For now, this fragile truce is good. But I’ve never been one to settle, never been one to let anything lay, and now with the memory-dream of Gadreel lurking behind my shoulder, I have to know. It’s been nagging me since I found out about Sam and Lucifer, since Bobby recalled it with halting, pain-sharpened words.

Been nagging me since I died, and watched Sam limp back to the bunker with Gadreel bright under his skin.

What was it that finally caused Sam to eject Gadreel when my death didn’t? It’s a crazy making question, but I have to know.

Sam lets out this sharp sound, of pain, of resignation when I ask.

_“So how_ did _you get free from Gadreel?”_

He snaps his laptop shut before he finally looks at me full-on, and maybe it’s my imagination, but the twist in his mouth looks an awful lot like betrayal. Too late, I realize I stabbed the sleeping giant.

His jaw goes taut, and he snaps at me, “I don’t know what you’re looking for, Kevin. You don’t want me too feel _bad_ , you’re glad I’m here, you don’t want me to help you. You don’t want me to _blame_ myself, but you want to take what happened to me, take my experience, and look at it? For what? Your curiosity? To see if I’m upset? Do I need to prove I hurt when you died? How much pain is acceptable, Kevin? Or do you just want to know if I remember what it felt like to kill you? Is that it?”

I put my hands up, placating, creating space between us. Oh God, is that what I was doing? Turning his pain over in my hands like a tourist? My voice creaks as I say, “No. No, Sam, I…”

“It was _Crowley_ ,” he flings it at me, as he rockets to his feet, towering over me as I hunch over the table and try not to shake. “Crowley possessed me. He came into my body and found where I was living in Gadreel’s fantasy. Crowley told me I was being possessed by Gadreel, and then I threw Gadreel out.” Sam looks around the bunker wildly. “I remember everything. I killed you in here. Like this—“ He haphazardly reaches for my face, and all I see is his palm coming for my head, it’s like being doused in icy water, I start shaking, flinch away from his touch. Sam reconsiders and pulls his hand back. “I dream about it. Killing you. Are you happy? Is that what you wanted? I can’t ever forget, Kevin. Whatever my shortcomings, I—“ Sam sinks back into his chair, mouth twisted and face pinched. Defeated looking. He never continues the thought, and I’m not selfish enough to press him. “You should go back to Neighbor. Your mom should be back by time you get there. Do you need anything?” he asks dully.

“No.” Shit, I really fucked up. He was possessed by Crowley? I almost can’t imagine anything worse. And Crowley helped him? It must have been in exchange for his freedom. I’d wondered why they’d let Crowley go. I rub my face, but I’m still shaking. My eyes hurt as I avoid Sam’s gaze. “I’m sorry. I—I’ll text you when I get back.”

“Drive safe.”

But he doesn’t look up as I walk out. Doesn’t say anything when I take my duffle to the car. I just leave, not knowing if I will be welcomed here again.


	4. Chapter 4

_Day 344_

The drive back is terrible. Sixteen hours is a long time to sit by yourself and stew in how _awful_ you are. I pull over three times to text Sam, the words always the same: _I’m sorry_. But I don’t send them.

Even though I am sorry, it won’t repair anything. I can’t say I blame Sam for kicking me out.

Mom is playing Skyrim when I get in. I hang back in the doorway, while she jumps off a rock. Her little Breton is heavily armored with fire crackling at her fingertips. I’ve never seen her play a video game before, though she used to watch me play and offer ‘sound tactical advice.’ I say, “Hey, Mom. Listen. I’m sorry. For—you know, storming out on you.”

She pauses the game. “Kevin.” Mom doesn’t get up, instead she hunches over the controller like she’s ashamed. Of what, I don’t know. “I accept your apology,” she tells me, like she always has.

Mom used to tell me that if you tell people it’s all right when they apologize, it’s giving them permission to hurt you again. I try to remember that, but it’s so easy to downplay anger. It’s dangerous to seem too angry when you’re an alpha.

“I’m scared of losing you.” I sit down heavily beside her. “I’m terrified. And I can’t tell if you want to escape your deal, or if you’re determined to see it through. Either way, I’m not sitting around, waiting for you to die. But I’d like to know—if you’re on my side on this or not. I’m on yours, even if you don’t think I am.”

“Oh, Kevin.” Mom tosses aside the controller.

She takes my hands in hers, eyes watering “Oh, Kevin,” she repeats. “Of course I know you’re on my side. If—if you think I’m not afraid… I don’t know that I’ve ever been more scared. Ignoring the future won’t make it go away, will it?” It isn’t a real question. Her mouth twists with the answer she knows. “I can’t keep moping. We won’t let him get us again, will we?”

“No,” I say. “We won’t.” Relief is potent enough I want to cry. Instead, I hug her without intention to let her go.

That afternoon, I come down the stairs to a familiar scene. Mom has cleared the kitchen table, to make room for her home laptop—the one I can use—and her work laptop. Pens and pencils and sticky notes and legal pads litter the table. For one terrible, wonderful second I think I’m back in Heaven.

It’s not Mom’s fault. I tried to recreate our work days in my Heaven: I set up my computers, spread out utensils and papers in the same pattern she used to. Before Mom notices me, I go back upstairs. Rifle through my duffle until I find the blue flower shirt. I inhale deeply—Mom’s scent, sharp and bitter.

This is real.

I’m about to put the shirt away when it hits me—Mom is just downstairs. I could have asked for a hug. Could have gotten closer to her. Instead, I’m up here, alone with a shirt. Acting like she’s gone already. I take the shirt back downstairs with me when I go. Mom is already working when I re-enter, but she stops to watch me.

Resignation flickers across her face. Shame curls in my stomach. “I thought you might have it.” Mom holds her hand out.

It takes me a second, but I realize what she wants. Then I return her shirt to her. I can’t meet her eyes; I’m watching the day through the window. “I’m sorry.” I’ve apologized so much recently, the words have lost all meaning. An empty signifier.

“I’ll get you something better,” she promises. Just give me time.”

_Day 337_

The two of us research together. It’s different from how I research with Sam—Mom and I take more breaks. Usually reading breaks. But I worry more about Mom, and she chefs under it.

“Don’t hover,” she snapped one day as she carefully stretched her stiffened hands. “I won’t pick up your slack.”

Still, we fall into a familiar rhythm, and I feel calmer for it. I can’t remember the last time we hung out before I died.

It only helps so much to think that we’re making new memories, when both the past and the future loom on and on without seeming end. I read with a creaky voice: 

_“Dear Joe,_

_I wish that we could at least have said goodbye to each other before you left New York. I think I understand why you ran away. I am sure that you must blame me for what happened. If I had not sent to Hermann Hoffman, then your brother would not have been on that ship. I don’t know what would have become of him in that case. And neither do you. But I accept and understand that you might hold me responsible. I suppose that I might have run away, too._

_I know that you still love me. It’s an article of faith for me that you do and that you always will. And it breaks my heart to think that we might never see or touch each other ever again. But what is even more painful to me is the thought—the certainty that I have—that right now you are wishing that you and I had never—”_

Mom stops me mid-sentence, carefully, saying, “I have something for you.”

I don’t let go of the book, but I twist toward her. A glittering, silver chain necklace. One I haven’t seen before. Mom dangles it from her fingers, and should I know what it is? Is this some lost relic from our family I’ve never met that should fill me with familial fervor? Mom is always two steps ahead of me, though, and she doesn’t hesitate for more than a moment before she slips her wedding ring off.

The chain makes sense: it’s for me to put the ring on. Too overwhelmed to say anything, I take the jewelry when she offers it.

“You’re welcome,” she says without the usual snippiness when I don’t say thank you. No, instead, she just seems tired. “Since your father’s ring is gone,” burned up, she doesn’t say, “I thought this would be a suitable replacement.”

I throw myself at her for a hug, even before I hang her ring around my neck. Without letting go, as if the proximity will limit the sting of my words, like my scent will calm her (even though I’m an alpha and it’s not supposed to work like that), I ask the question I haven’t asked since I was eight: “You loved him a lot, didn’t you?”

“I did.” She becomes distant, a faraway memory.

I don’t mean to press her, but I ask, tentatively, “Could you tell me about him one day?”

‘Before the year is up. I will.” She pauses. Then smiles. “Don’t worry. I won’t be going anywhere.”

_Day 336_

We sit in the car long enough most people stop trying to take our parking spot. Saturday, and the mall is crawling. Mom watches a man carry a toddler across the parking lot, the man’s great long hair bound into a bun at the top of his head, and she grips the wheel so tightly I can see her scars in bright relief. “We could go back home,” I say, an echo of when she used to drag me screaming to this very mall in middle school. “I bet we could just order something on Amazon.”

“Kevin. We can’t keep hiding in the house. If we cower for the rest of our lives, we lose. whatever the outcome of my deal. Get out of the car.” She unlocks the doors with an ominous beep.

I stall with my hand on the handle. Outside, a few women with linked arms watch us sit in our car with scorn. Their eyes are bright. My breath is heavy, fighting me. “Get out of the car,” I repeat, as Mom slides out her door with no apparent trouble. The sun glints off her sunglasses. A man passes by her, and nothing happens. No demon. Mom slams her door shut; this is it.

If I stay, she’ll leave without me. She’s walking away from the car. I can’t let her go alone.

Mom smiles when I jog to catch up. “Anything in particular you need, honey?” Kinder. A reward for being brave. Just like when I was a kid.

“Pretzels?” I ask, perhaps more hopefully than I should. Soft pretzels with cream cheese are probably one of my favorite things, period. I resist the urge to clutch her hand, because I’m—twenty? Twenty-one? Do I count the time I spent dead? If I did, would I go by Heaven time or Earth time?—either way, I can’t hold my mom’s hand like I’m a child. Instead, I clutch the necklace with her wedding ring and count my breaths. _One two three four five_. “And coffee?” 

“It wouldn’t be a trip to the mall without it.” Her smile is strained, but reaches her eyes.

Maybe we should have compromised. Left the house, but come on a Wednesday right when the mall opened. Still getting out, without _quite_ as many people. But I don’t suggest we get back in the car. That alpha protectiveness claws at me as I survey the parking lot, but nobody is coming at my mom. I guess it wouldn’t make sense for Crowley to send demons after us, anyway; he’s got us already. It’s just a matter of when he fucking shows up and tells me what he wants.

I know he wants something, and I know he wants it from me. Eventually, he'll get tired of this letting me fester thing and come to collect. Not that it changes my plan. The best course of action is still to kill him, not to make a deal with him. But knowing what he wants might at least help me sleep at night. 

Mom pulls me out of my thoughts by squeezing my shoulder. "We're going in," she decides, that sharp alpha growl in her voice.

However much I hate it when she uses that voice to order me around, my own bullshit instincts rubbed raw by hers, some part of me feels better knowing she has a plan that I can follow. We cross the parking lot like it's a minefield. Gingerly, with all the attention we possess collectively.

The doors slide open with a sense of finality, and we step through them, together. Around us, people chit-chat about prices and their families and jobs and lives. I overhear a pair of beta teenage girls talking about the upcoming presidential election, hypothesizing who they think will be running. A long time ago--four years ago?--I would have listened with rapt attention. What did they want out of a presidential hopeful? What were their politics? Their values? Now, I feel a hollow pang for that child I was.

From Mom's pinched expression, she's heard them, too. "Food first, or clothes?" she asks with false levity, all that alpha certainty melted from her. 

"Lets reward ourselves with food after we shop. That way we have to pick out some clothes." I try for practicality, that same reward system I used to use, hoping that the familiarity will comfort her.

But she is still uneasy as we walk the brimming halls of the mall, and she flinches every time someone bumps into her. An omega woman, probably only a year or so older than me, bumps into my mom because she forgets to look up from texting, and I snarl at her—full alpha teeth-bear. The woman blanches, taking a step back. "Kevin!" Mom snaps. "Apologize!"

"Watch where you're going!" the anger swift and protective, before I see the woman flinch like mom did. “I—sorry. Sorry. Just—rough day. Sorry."

She sizes me up, her shoulders hunched protectively. “Just—just leave me alone, knothead.” But her voice is soft, scared, and I feel like an asshole. Guilt rises up, bringing a flush to my face that I can feel, and I watch my shoes as she brushes past me.

Mom says nothing, her disapproval a dark cloud over me. We move silently through the mall, and I don’t look up except when I have to.

One of the things I hate about being an alpha is moments like these. Moments where the control slips. Where my angers flares through, and I can’t be sure if it’s some instinctual territorial bullshit, or if it’s simply a moment of anger that other people interpret as obtuse alphaness.

Maybe it’s not being an alpha I hate—it’s how other people respond to my being an alpha.

She leads me into the department store—Macy’s, it looks like from the decoration. I shuffle behind her, barely lifting my feet. Apparently, I am contrite enough—she smiles at me. “Do you want to go together, or is it still not cool to shop with mom?”

In the past, I’d ditched her to go shopping with Channing and our friends, and my stomach sinks. Channing and I would hold hands as we walked through the mall, that teenage assumption that nothing could touch us or pull us apart. Mom would give me money and drop me off, and if I hurt her feelings by not going with her instead, she never said. “I—let’s go together,” I say, some note of desperation clawing into my voice.

I can’t do this myself—with Mom out of arm’s reach, with every mall-goer a potential threat, with Channing’s memory brushing fingers with mine. I clench my hands. “Please,” I say, and I don’t meet her eyes.

Mom understands. Or, at least, she doesn’t press me. We scour the racks as a team, for me first, because that seems to be her M.O. Kevin first first first, everything else last. I let the bitterness wash over me, as I find blue plaid. Maybe my taste in fashion has changed a little. More Winchester-chic. But it’s comfortable, and I look great in blue. Or Channing thought so. My throat closes. I hold up a soft flannel shirt for her inspection.

“…It’s a good color. Do you like it?” she asks, mouth pursed.

Does she like it? Is she worried about the plaid? Will it look horrible on me? My idea of what looks good has been a little skewed by the whole hermit thing. I clutch it in my hands, white-knuckled, and mom picks me out two more of the same kind in different colors. Green and grey. “Here,” she says, softly. “We’ll try them on after we find you some pants.” 

I follow her to the pants and—I can’t help myself. In the young male omega section, racks of skinny jeans in neon colors flash, and I gravitate toward it. If I had worn stuff like this in high school, I would have been laughed off the planet. But now, I have no one to impress except Mom and Sam. Mom hangs behind me. “You—this is what you want?” She frowns at the sound of her words, even as I go still. “No, no. It’s fine. Just—it isn’t what I’m used to.”

 “I’m—I have a lot more to be afraid of, now, than what clothes I wear.” It’s blunt, but true. “If we’re not taking safe risks, like this, what are we doing?”

Her own sentiment, turned on her. She smiles in appreciation: I would have made a great politician in another life.

To prove my point, perhaps a little more sharply than I intend, I find a pair of the neon pink in my size. She finds green for me. To be fair, she has to know pink and green are my favorite colors. Even in high school, I wore pink sometimes, just because I liked it. And, besides, sometimes people were less likely to call me a knothead if I wore pink. “Thanks.”

Once we find me some plainer fair: white and black shirts, a few pairs of blue jeans, and some socks, we move on to her.

Finding petite slacks and blouses has always been the worst. Mom and I hunt and hunt through the racks like we hunt through books in our search for Crowley. By time we find her a single pair of pants in her size, I’m starting to wonder if maybe saving Mom will be easier than finding pants. I have to laugh, even as Mom triumphantly pulls a pair just like the first off the rack. “Good. Now, I think I need a new dress, don’t you?”

I follow the script by agreeing. When Mom decides to treat herself, it’s always a fun ride.

The dress I pull out is intended as a joke. Glimmering gold, it is made of a clinging material and, on Mom, is about knee-length. The sleeves are long, but the neckline dips and dips, and the back is practically nonexistent. I hold it up for her with a grin. 

She catches hold of the fabric, letting it trickle like water over her fingertips. “Let’s go to the dressing room.” Mom takes it from my hands, and I watch her walk without realizing I’m supposed to follow.

Of all the dresses, it’s the only one she takes to try on. I see her checking the size as she walks. I stumble after her to the dressing rooms. Once in our separate rooms, I take a breath—surprised to find I am more excited to try on the pink pants than I am worried about not being able to see Mom. It helps that I can hear the rustling of fabric next door.

I slide into the skinny jeans, fitting into them like a second skin. I have to exhale to button it, but they fit. I absolutely check my ass first, and decide it looks _awesome_.

I put the blue flannel on with it, and decide that even if it looked like garbage, which it doesn’t, I’d have to keep it simply for how comfortable and soft it is against my skin.

Mom is waiting for me when I step out. I forget to ask her how I look at the sight of her. The dress fits her like a soft golden light. It clings to her skin and flows at her legs, and she twirls, glimmering with it, and her back is exposed—I can see the crisscross of ridged scars across her back, scars she didn’t have before, and I swallow thickly, but keep something of a smile in place. “I’ll need a slip underneath it,” she tells me, as she faces me again, as though she guesses my thoughts. “But good find. And look at you.” She laughs a little, at the pants probably, and I have to laugh too—me in my pink pants, her in this firefly dress that showcases her scars—and we laugh at each other. “These are all winners. Go try on the rest.”

Even though I don’t have the golden dress, I feel like I’m the one glowing as we try on the rest. After we buy only what we like—including the jeans and the dress—we go and get pretzels, sitting on one of the benches outside the mall as people pass.

All in all, it’s the best day out I can remember. 

_Day 335_

I needle her into agreeing to do nothing the next day. After our exciting day out, I need time in the house just me and her. Nothing to make me snarl. Nothing to raise the protective curl of anger in me. Mom agrees quickly enough she probably thought of it first. Maybe she decided just as soon as she stepped over my makeshift bed in her hallway without waking me. The plan is to lounge around the house and convince Mom to play more Skyrim, because it’s gorgeous and everyone should get to be a hero in fantasy.

Days like these, where we didn’t have to do anything or be anywhere are what I missed most in Heaven.

There’s something exhausting about constantly reliving only the _best_ memories, high energy and intense, until you find the gaps where the passion should be. From those gaps, I carved out space for myself and yanked myself from the rememory, and, not long after, Ash found me.

I sat curled on the floor, the house shrouded with darkness, but I couldn’t banish the mint and linen as I could the specter of my mom. _Kevin, I’m so proud of you for making the honor roll_ over and over, the same voice, with the same inflection. The same dull eyes. My imagination failing the memory of her.

Ash came into my house and whistled. I jolted, instinctively scrambling away before I remembered I was already dead. What could he do to me, honestly? “Kevin Tran, am I right?” he didn’t wait for an answer, though, just flicked his hair back. “See you got tired of the memory replay. Didn’t last long for you. Most people take longer to go crazy. Good on ya.” He smiled brightly at me, like he hadn’t waltzed into my Heaven without a shirt.

“Who—?”

“Friend of Sam and Dean’s.” He paused. “Listen, heard about you n’ the angels. Tough break, little man. All over angel radio: the prophet killed by Gadreel. Definitely rough. You wanna help out your fellow man? See, things in Heaven—ain’t good, even though Metawhatever is gone. Some of us, we got to thinkin’—Humanity isn’t really _safe_ here in Heaven. And if we’re gonna be here, it ain’t gonna be on the terms of angels, not when they keep destroying us and killing us in their wars, yeah? You got some experience, from the sounds of it. Want in?”

I barely even stopped to consider. Anything was better than the merry-go-round of carnivalesce memories. I needed to escape my head. _Do_ something. So back to work I went.

I’ve just opened _The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay_ when my phone rings. It must be Sam with news, since he’s the only one other than mom who has the number. Instead, the caller ID doesn’t register, and my hand stills on the plastic. I suck in a breath. Answer the phone.

“Kev,” that so familiar voice—I half expect to find myself dreaming. “Long time no chat. Sorry not to get in contact earlier, you know how it is. It’s not easy being King.” I can smell his cologne permeating over the paint-smell.

“Crowley.” It’s an alpha snarl, totally warranted.

He laughs, like he always did when I pulled the alpha bullshit on him. Asked me, once, if I wanted to knot him—his omega body hadn’t had one in _so long._ “Must say, I really loved those dazzling pants of yours, Kev. Very bright. Nice fit. Though, couldn’t hold a candle to Linda. That dress you found for her really showed it all off, I must say. Really a shame about those nasty marks on her skin though. Somebody _must_ do something about that.” He pauses for effect. It works. My gaze flits to the windows. He’s been watching us the whole time. Of course he has been.

He doesn’t strike me as the type to let things that belong to him just wander off.

Mom has gone still beside me, breath caught in her chest. More scared that I’ve ever seen her. Trembling like she’ll break. I try to find words, but Crowley—the wordsmith—beats me to it. “I suppose you’ve been wondering what is it I want, Kev. Why oh why would I take dear Linda’s soul? To make you suffer? To make her suffer? After all, it hurt for a moment when she punched me as she did. Trust me, I did think of it. You’ve caused me so much trouble, Kev, I thought about being vindictive. Lucky for you, we’re friends, Kev. I _care_ about you.” His voice is slick, coats my nerves, leaves me shaking.

The cologne floods my senses, just the memory of it enough to make me raw. 

“What do you _want?_ ” I try to keep my voice steady.

“It’s simple really. Now, I know you and Moose are hoping to kill me before blah blah blah with all that righteous anger. But—clock’s ticking, Kev. Just think: if you translate the angel tablet for me, I’ll give you your mother dearest back.”

The angel tablet? How would he even _get_ the angel tablet? And why the angel tablet instead of the demon tablet? “You realize that even if I _had_ the angel tablet, I couldn’t read it, right?” 

“I don’t know need you to _understand_ it. But the cuneiform that I can read would be all I’d need.” Silky smooth delivery. I clutch the phone tight enough my fingers start to hurt. “And don’t worry. I’ll provide the tablet, free of charge. Don’t decide today, Kev. I’m enjoying watching you, Mommy, and Moose fumble. Keep looking for me, sweetheart. I’m enjoying it.”

“Wait—!” I need to, to keep him talking figure out more of his plan. But he’s gone. I keep the phone pressed to my ear, but nothing happens.

All I can hear is my breathing and Mom’s. In this empty house. My voice is shaking when I say, “He’s been watching us. He’ll—he’ll let you go. If I translate the angel tablet for him.” I don’t look at her. “He knows what we did yesterday. Is probably watching us now. He knows we’re looking for him. That—that the plan is to kill him before—“

Mom pulls the curtains on the windows, all of them in the house, like it will do us any good. Like there is anything in this house we can protect. I put my face into my hands as she makes her rounds through the house. “Kevin,” she says, finally, as she finishes. “Kevin, what could he possibly want with the angel tablet?” 

“Nothing good.”

Beyond that, I don’t know. Is my need to thwart his plans larger than my love for my mom? I think I know the answer already, but what does it make me? Mom doesn’t say anything else, and I wonder if she’s thinking the same thing. We sit on the couch in silence. Every noise outside makes us jump.

I thought I’d feel better to know what he wants. Now? Well.

What is the price of loving another? How far do we allow ourselves to fall to protect another? I watch Mom through the corner of my eye, and wish that I could stand the thought of losing her. Was this what she felt like, when she sold her soul? Or, was it something else? After all, Mom and I are the only ones to be hurt from her deal. If I give Crowley what he wants… well. The possibilities are endless. I shouldn’t even entertain the idea, but I am. 

Oh, I am.

_Day 333_

We spend two days in the house, curled up together watching the windows. The salt lines are so thick now that they are nearly mountains around the windows and doors. Mom spends one morning painting our wards again, so the whole place smells even more strongly of paint. I don’t even complain. Better paint than cologne. Sam tells me that he’s looking on his end. Every few hours or so, he shoots me a text to let me know he can’t find anything. No omens. No sign of Crowley. Nothing.

On the second day, Mom puts a hand on my wrist. “We can’t keep doing this, honey.”

“…Do you want to read?” I reach for the book, where we’ve been able to read a page or two at a time before one or both of us is distracted. My throat is thick, though. I know what she means. “Or I could read.”

“Kevin, this has to stop. We can’t stay cooped up in this house forever, scared of the monster at the end of this book. We’ve agreed on this.” She lifts _Kavalier & Clay_ out of my hands carefully, and I don’t meet her eyes. She’s right, of course.

After Crowley disconnected, I didn’t even set the phone down before I called Sam. “He called me.” My voice was breathlessly high. No commanding alpha growl. No sign of being an adult. No. I sounded like a child, and barely cared. “Crowley’s been watching us. He knows—everything, as far as I can tell.”

“Did he say what he wants?” Sam knew. Sam knew Crowley wanted something. It was suddenly easy to understand that Sam had been in my position before.

I bit my lip. Did I tell him, or not? But could he help if he didn’t know all of it? “My mom in exchange for my reading the angel tablet.” I said it in one breath, and hoped he didn’t guess I was considering it. But it was a foolish hope. The long pause that followed told me he guessed. It wasn’t hard to guess.

Sam said, “I’ll find him. You and your mom stay put.”

“Kevin, honey,” Mom is placating now, hands on my shoulders. I’m shaking. I can’t stop. All I can think is that Crowley is going to take her. Torture her _again_ , and I will have done nothing to stop him—just like the last time. “This is a scare tactic. He wants to divert us from trying to stop him. Kevin, you’ll do better researching at the bunker with Sam. And I—need to get out of this house. It’s driving me crazy.”

“But where would you go? To work, by yourself?” I turn away from her. I can’t make her do anything. I know that. But I’ve always worried. And everything that’s happened, this threat now, has just made it worse.

“Jody Mills. One of the hunters the Winchesters know.” I turn back to see Mom smile a little. Like when I was little, and scared that a fire would rage through our house at night before we could wake up. That little ‘don’t worry, Kevin’ smile. Dammit, but part of the knot in my stomach loosens. “She’s helped me before. Said her door was always open. I’ll give her a call, see if she wouldn’t mind a visit. Then, I wouldn’t be alone. She’s dealt with Crowley before.”

“You’re sure? Mom, we could just—“

“That’s enough. Kevin, if you want to stay—you’re an adult now. You can make your own choices, but don’t presume to make mine for me. I’m going. Now, do you want the car? Or do you want to stay?” She has that alpha mom voice on now, and on habit, I hunch in on myself. Somethings even death can’t take from you. The desire to listen to my mom, to make her happy, is one of them.

“I’ll take the car,” I tell her. “Let’s get you a ticket.”


	5. Chapter 5

_Day 332_

Mom enters the airport without looking back.The doors slide shut behind her, and I clench my hands over the steering wheel. She’ll call when she gets in, but it’s not enough. Not really. I can smell everything in sharp relief—her scent, my coffee-bitter sweat, the old chemical air freshener. My alpha instincts in gear, simmering under my skin as fear makes my grip white-knuckled. But my anger, my fear, my protection—all these are better spent in the bunker. I steel myself.

The next sixteen hours will be Hell. 

Sunrise ghosts pink over the horizon as I drive, the morning serenely empty on the highway. Crowley’s cologne—my memory of it, the reality of it—masks the other scents, and I drive one-handed to grasp the wedding ring. It can’t banish the scent. (In that way, her shirt would be better, but it’s insane to want it. I know that.)

I let myself consider—what could he want with the angel tablet? A way to destroy the angels? To enter Heaven? Power? How could I even know, if I were to just give him the cuneiform? How could he even have gotten his hands on the angel tablet? 

I clench my hands. Can I do it? Can I give him what it wants, if it will help Mom? I did it for Dick, after all. What’s once more? Can I doom Heaven, the angels, God knows what else for one life? If I doom Heaven, what’s the point? What would happen to the Roadhouse? To our cause? To my friends? What kind of prophet would it make me, to give in to the King of Hell?

Maybe this—this _weakness—_ is why God protected prophets with archangels, to keep from basic, unhallowed corruption. What if I do? No—no. I can’t consider this. If I work with Mom and Sam, we can stop Crowley. Permanently.

I _have_ to stop him.

In the end, though will my vengeance, will my alpha anger be stronger than my love? But if I can beat Crowley _and_ save Mom, that’s my preference. It has to be.

Sam is passed out at the table when I get in. His face twists in his sleep, hands fisted. Soft whines like a hurt dog. Is he dreaming of Hell? Gadreel? Parts of his life I don’t even know?

Sharp pain sound. Does his arm hurt, or is it from the dreams? I read a book, once, where one of the characters had PTSD. Someone woke her up, and she attacked in fear, nearly killing her lover. Is that an actual thing? Maybe I shouldn’t touch him. I hang back at the base of the stairs. Sam sucks in a whine through his teeth.

“Sam?” I venture, trying for soothing and safe, but that sixteen hour drive heaped onto the hell of the past few days makes me jagged. Sharper. It might be the alpha thing, but more likely I’m just a disaster. “Sam?” Louder, more authoritative.

He jerks awake with a wet-sounding gasp. His are red, over-bright, but I avert my gaze to spare him embarrassment. “Kevin?” His voice is thick and dragging. “You’re—oh. Right.” Relief bleeds into him, makes his face slacken, and he reaches out with his good hand, apparently I didn’t stand far enough away, his knuckles brush my cheek. I don’t, I _don’t_ flinch this time, but barely. “I—it was your your _eyes_ ,” and I know, know with a startling tingle behind my eyes, like tears but really not. Sam and I share the same nightmare from opposing sides. “Your mom get out safe?”

“Yeah. Settled in with Jody and her daughter.” Easier to talk about Mom than the memories. Both of us seem to agree.

Sam is pale and shivering, lips cracked, and heavy dark bags under his eyes. His nightmares seem more real now than when I used to watch him sleep. Maybe empathy is easier outside of the Veil? Or maybe because now I share his fears, whereas before my fear was distant?

“Here. Come on.” I hold my hand out to him, surprised when he takes it. 

Mostly he’s trying to be kind, I guess, because I don’t really know how much I help him up, given his size in comparison to mine. Without complaint, he follows me to the kitchen. I hunt through the cupboards, but I’m not surprised to find absolutely no hot chocolate. Instead, I turn on the coffeepot. Sam watches me as he leans against the counter. “When Mom has nightmares—“ I don’t tell him about mine, given he stars in many of them these days. “I make her hot chocolate. But coffee is close enough, I guess.”

Sam accepts the mug with a nod of thanks. His face crumples, mouth curled downwards as he looks into the drink. If I didn’t know for a fact he likes coffee, I’d think he was allergic. Honestly, he looks sad—that timeless ‘you can’t understand what I’ve been through’ grief, and I don’t—I was trying to be nice, to help, but somehow I’m _still_ an asshole, and I open my mouth to offer to get him something else, or apologize, but he says, “Dean used to do the same. When I was younger. I don’t know _how_ we always managed to have it, given everything. But he’d make it for me. Grumpy I’d woken him up, but more worried than anything.” Sam clenches his hands around the mug. “I appreciate it, Kevin. Really.” Voice softer now.

I try to smile, or something, anything. Mostly, I feel sorry for him. I want to help, but—well, I’m not sure how. I’m not sure anything can, except finding Dean and Crowley. But God, my throat _hurts_ for him, but still I want—

No, no. No. His concern is friendly, not. Not.

It’s hard. He’s one of the only people left I ever see, and it’s giving me mixed signals. Still, we’re both alphas. And men. I shouldn’t… I wasn’t lying when I told him I’m not gay, except I want to be closer, take in his scent. He thinks I smell good. I look at the jagged edges of my nails. “You’re welcome.” Too lame, especially after so long a pause. Defensively, embarrassed, I snap, “We’ll find him.”

“Kevin?” His eyes suddenly sharp. “Are you all right?”

Great. I grimace. “Yeah. Sorry. Just stress and everything. You know.”

This is _so_ embarrassing, my cheeks are heating, and I absolutely can’t look at him. Sam, though, is pretty much a genius—almost as much as Ash is (was?)—and he knows something is up. The mug clinks as he puts it down, before Sam’s hand engulfs my wrist. He’s warm. Too warm. Might be a fever. “Kevin. Hey. It’s okay. I’m not—“

The thing is, it’s not that I’m impulsive. I _have_ a plan. An excuse made of fear, of desperation, of grief. I have a way out and, well, it’s probably my survival instinct that I’ve cultivated. Or maybe I just _hate_ being embarrassed. Always have. So I have a way out. Sam’s kind enough, I figure he’ll give me that, if I need it.

It isn’t even that I’m in love with Sam. I don’t think. Not like I was—am?—with Channing. I want him to stop hurting. I want to stop hurting. I want that intimacy. The curve of his hands, just not at my face, shit. That curl of hair at his nap. I want to be closer. And, frankly, I want to be wanted. All of my love, passion, feelings used to be spread out across all my friends and those people in my family I knew, and now only Mom and Sam are left.

So it’s not that I’m in love with Sam, exactly, but the care and intensity is enough to push back the memories of pain and abandonment. Especially when confronted with this shrinking, grieving man. Even though Sam is a man and an alpha, even though I’m young and still dead-crazy. Even though everything. I do it. Not impassively, but with a way out if I need it.

I cut Sam off by briefly, softly bumping my chapped mouth against his. My nose fills even more with his salty, sour fear, his alpha sharp, that bitter coffee still wet on his lips. His lips are warm, soft beneath the dead skin. Even so, I don’t linger. Pull back. The words _shit, I’m sorry_ on my tongue, even though I’m not, really. I chance a look at him through my bangs to see his nostrils flared—taking in my scent? Hell, my hands fist as my stomach _clenches_ —and eyes narrowed at me. “I’m going to assume,” he pauses, blows out a breath, “I’m going to assume that’s not part of your technique for comforting your mom.” He drops my wrist, and I miss the heat already.

Well, now I know he wasn’t hitting on me whole he was drunk. Good to know. I flush. Wow, this is worse than the time I kissed Channing after eating pickled onions. Maybe that’ll be a memory to recreate in Heaven later. It’s funny now, enough that I smile. Great. Now he’s going to think I’m an idiot.

I start to apologize again, but Sam beats me. “Kevin. It’s okay. But I’m not… I can’t play this game with you.” He frowns, watching me long enough I want to crawl into a hole. “I won’t lie and say I’m not interested. If you are really interested, we could try it out. But—dating me tends not to go well for the other person.” 

I stop him there. “I’ve died already, Sam. What happened to me, happened because I’m a prophet. Not because I met you. The most my death had to do with you? Was your skin. What happens to me happens because I’m Kevin Tran. Not because I’m Kevin Tran who knows Sam Winchester.” I paused without looking at him, allowing myself a deep, steadying breath. He waits for me to speak, even as history resonates between us: the failures, the anger, the loss, and now this interest. But to go forward, with all that in the past—I swallow. “Everything that happened, happened before. I died, you know? Things are different now. Can’t we just—forget it, and try something new?” 

Erasing the guilt. That’s what I want. Not just for Sam, because he shouldn’t blame himself for what God caused, but also for me. For throwing him into the Trials, for being an asshole.

Both of us have blood on our hands, but I’m sick of living with it. I’d like to be clean again.

Sam looks more tired than anything when I look up at him. But he sips his coffee pensively, then nods. “Sure, Kevin.” A slow blooming smile that I’ve never seen before. It’s bright, and almost easy, and my breath is gone as I blink up at him. Reality sinking in: this is something that’s happening. “We can try." 

The anxiety uncoils bleeding into warmth. I want to touch, to be in his space, but acceptance has made me shy. The reality sharper, harder to ignore. Another Alpha man. _Sam Winchester._ The age difference. The past. The realizations hit dizzyingly, and I am staring at his gleaming smile. Oh my God, how long have I been staring? He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Relax, Kevin. We still have work today. We can talk later. Both of us should think this through more.”

He’s giving me a graceful out. Resentment and gratitude color into the same emotion, but I follow him dutifully.

I struggle to focus as I pour over a stack of Michigan newspapers. My highlighter is slow-moving as I feign diligence.

When I was a kid, eleven-or-so, I never could focus. It frustrated me more than Mom, sometimes. I’d be trying to read, or watch Pokemon, or do homework, or talk to someone and my thoughts would creep away, slowly at first. Then—poof. Gone. I’d be worrying about what Mom was making for dinner, or thinking about that scene from _The Prisoner of Azkaban_ where Lupin gives Harry the chocolate, or wondering what I’d be when I grew up. If Mom would be proud of me. Eventually, Mom took me to Dr. Ender for my panic attacks, and the focus thing got better. These days, though, I feel more like the panicky, distracted eleven-year-old.

Sam, though, appears unshakeable. Which I know because I’m more than half-watching him. He reads. Makes notes. I try to pretend I’m not watching, but he probably knows. He’s a hunter, after all, and I’m not that subtle. I attempt to realign, but his scent seems more potent than normal, harder to ignore. Maybe because I was so close earlier. It’s lingered. 

I feel like a teenager again, on one of those first few distracting study dates with Channing. But she’d been as distracted as me. Somehow, I felt less embarrassed then. 

I hunch over the latest paper, and remember Crowley. The reason why Sam and I have to keep going. His musical, dissonant voice. The heavy cologne cloying my sense. The curl of his fingers into my throat. His smirk. It’s enough. The memory of Crowley banishes Sam and his scent, and my fingers tighten around the highlighter. My lines are vengeful. My breath comes fast. I can feel the ripple of Crowley’s breath at my nape, and I shiver and I—I focus. I I have to. I have to find Crowley, have to save Mom, have to keep working—translating—or he’ll cut off another finger— 

“Kevin, Kevin. Hey.” Sam pulls me back with a hand to my cheek. “It’s all right.”

I can feel myself shaking as I return to myself. Great. Now I’m gasping, panicked, and more useless than I was before. “Sorry. I lost track of things. It wasn’t you.” I try to smile, and his hung hand spans so much of my face as he strokes over the skin. His expression on me intent. Focused. I calm more at his petting.

“Kevin, Crowley and Dean have to take precedence for now. Are you—?” 

“Yeah.” I pull back, retrieving the highlighter. “Sam, I have to save my Mom and find Crowley. I know. I wouldn’t want anything else. But I want to try, too. Do you?” 

“Absolutely.” And his kiss is quick and chaste, and then we read. 

_Day 322_

Sort-of-kind-of dating Sam turns out to be _nothing_ like what I expect. It isn’t even that I went in with a long list of criteria, it’s just that the last time I dated was Channing. I can barely recognize myself anymore, so my part of the equation is variable, too. There’s a lot of unknowns, and I don’t really know what to do with that. 

*

Maybe I’m letting myself off too easily. I did have expectations. There’s a huge list of them for what an apha/alpha gay relationship looks like. Angry snarly physicality. Domination culminating in one person finally submitting (they’re the one who gets knotted. The de facto omega in the relationship). Fighting that covers love and concern. Granted, most of my knowledge comes from one book we read in English junior year and a couple of pornos. Neither Sam nor I are exactly classical knotheads, so I’m not surprised, exactly, when we don’t snap anymore than we usually do. But I have no idea what we’re trying to become. No end destination.

I like goals. Need them like breathing. Channing and I had a map. Date through high school. Lose virginity on graduation night (protected!). Long distance in college, until we eventually broke up or got married. 

There’s nothing like that with Sam. I have no footing.

The second night after our sort-of kiss, I tested it out. The snarly thing like alphas do in the movies. Take names, take charge. I snapped at Sam, “We should eat dinner. This will wait.” I gestured at the research spread out before us, waiting for Sam to snap back. Enter my space. It was too early to eat. I tensed, waiting and—

Sam glanced at me. “I’ll eat if you make something. I need to finish this first.” A pause as he jotted something down. “Take a break if you need, Kevin.” His tone was distracted, and all I could do was make us dinner, feeling the asshole.

The thing about Sam is he hardly seems to think about it. It is all normal to him. Even as ever. Productive as ever. Never seems flustered or distracted. If he is doing something else, his attention doesn’t turn to me.

Me, though? Hell. I think about it frequently, if not constantly. His scent, his citrus soap, the intent of his eyes. The pain in his shoulder. I notice it all. Even as I try not to, because our priorities have to be matched, perfectly, on Crowley.

It’s selfish, but I want his attention. His conversation, his hands, his gaze—any attention I can get is good, for all that he keeps to our mission. In the shower, I run through conversations about perfomativity with him. I imagine telling him about Heaven and Sarah and Rufus. I want to share everything I know about my father with him, while he tells me about his mom. Maybe then I could tell him I met her. Mary Winchester.

In my daydreams, Sam always listens raptly. Smiles and apologizes at all the right points. Puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes right when I need him to. The real thing would be better, but I don’t know how to begin a real conversation. Not when we have so much to do. Not when Mom is so close to being Crowley’s.

I talk myself hoarse in the shower, but when I come out, all I can do is ask, “Find anything?” 

When I called Mom, I didn’t tell her about Sam and me. I asked about Jody and Alex, and how things were going. “Everything is fine, honey,” her voice pitched light, “Don’t worry.”

So instead, I read to her out _Kavalier & Clay_, but I thought about how to tell her, and the shame anxiety curled tightly in me. So I just kept reading. 

Once I knew _what_ Sam and I were doing, I decided then I would tell.

Then I would tell her. If there was anything to tell.

On the third night, Sam pushed aside his reading with a deep alpha growl. I jolted from where I’d been trying to remember pieces from the demon tablet. “This is pointless,” he snapped, and he reached for me.

His fingers spread over my collar, thumb resting on my clavicle. My pulse picked up, like it did whenever his hands come near my face but it wasn’t all bad that time, and I knew that he could feel my heartbeat. “This okay?” he asked, anger melted to concern. 

I wasn’t as conscientious as he was; I didn’t even pause to think like I had before. We were here, not working, his skin against mine, and I could smell him strong, strong, his sweat and frustration. I kissed him, and he curled his fingers into my shirt. Keeping me. Gentling me closer, until I sat on the table in front of him, his tongue against mine.

I relaxed into the soft, hot making out. No need for domination here. Mostly, I worried I was out of practice, but I learned quickly what Sam liked, as he kissed my long enough my mouth hurt the next day.

 

When I’d gone to kiss him the next morning, practically on reflex, he’d pressed against me, smelling like coffee, before he pulled back. “Morning. I think I found something. Grab some coffee, and we’ll get started.” I blinked at his back, then groggily went for the coffee. More surprised than hurt.

I think, looking back on the last few days, that our slip-sliding isn’t entirely blamed on our mission. It’s part of it. For all I’m more distracted by a potential relationship than he is, I’m no less dedicated to finding Crowley. I can’t heap blame upon Sam for something we both believe. We don’t always fit. With each other, anyway. He’ll say something, and I’ll snap something back, or I’ll say something, and he’ll snap back.

Harmless head butting that isn’t sexy or common at all. We give each other more space, and it’s fine. Other ways we misstep are worse. He’ll reach out to me when I’m totally intent on working, and I’ll flinch from his hands, sure I see blue. Guilt drives him away then, and I _feel_ bad for his guilt. Other times, I’ll mention a conversation I had in Heaven—trying to pull out the intimacy from the shower scenes—and I’ll turn to see Sam gone ashes and distant. I forget they’re his dead friends, that he has associated trauma, while I only knew them dead. I stop talking then, and we sit in silence after that.

I’ve discovered we’re bad at this, but I think it’s okay. Or it will be.

One night, I woke to Crowley’s cologne and shivered in bed for awhile, before I dragged myself into the kitchen. No hot chocolate, but coffee would work just as well. It would keep me out of Crowley’s grasp, at any rate. Sam had beat me to it, the coffee already brewing. “You too?” I asked. 

His expression tightened in answer. I settled up against his side, the sour of his sweat all-consuming. Must have been a really bad dream. Sam wrapped his good arm around me, tight enough to hurt, and I let my forehead rest against his shoulder. He didn’t ask what I’d dreamed, just like I didn’t ask. Instead, we drank our coffee and wished for hot chocolate.

“You going back to bed?” he finally asked.

“I—“ Would Crowley be waiting for me? “I don’t know. It’s—hard to separate myself from it. My dreams… You know?”

Sam held me closer. Her knew. If half of what Bobby told me was true, Sam knew. “Want to try together? Just to sleep.” He added hastily.

Sleeping with another person is different from what I expected. In the movies, they make it seem easy. Warm and cuddly and glorious, and the reality is absolutely not that. Sam hogs the bed like he was born for it; apparently I kick and make these little noises that aren’t even remotely cute at three in the morning; he is large and hot, and I wake frequently reeking of sweat. I also kind of figured that, given our size thing, that Sam would be the big spoon. Guy that huge, it totally makes sense.

But I always wake curled around him like some kind of human backpack, my nose buried in the hair at his nape. I am the big spoon, which is weird, but not bad weird. So I don’t complain about it, even though Sam has taken pretty much the whole bed and I’m probably clinging to him to keep from falling off the giant bed.

After that, we didn’t always sleep together. Just a handful of nights. Nights like tonight, when I look up at him over the spread of research, and feel the exhaustion settled into my bones. “Hey. You ready for bed?” No drama, no fuss.

Sam pushes his hair out of his eyes. “Yeah. Just let me finish this.”

I don’t know why, but we always sleep in his bed. Maybe he feels safer. Maybe I feel safer. I don’t know. Either way, we end up curled under his covers, my face pressed into the thick muscles in his back. His heat warms me, his scent soothing, and I think, as I’m drifting away, that I’ll need to go back to Neighbor soon. Mom is back from Jody’s, and I’m aching to see her again.

_Bright blue eyes, flash of light, heat, nothing but heat, notSam, his palm outstretched for me—_

I wake to the sight of Sam’s face, and I’m screaming before I can stop myself. Screaming, hoarse, and I shove—my hands connect with his hurt shoulder, and his pain sound sounds more startled than betrayed, and I’m rolling, right out of the bed, to hit the ground with a thump. “Fuck, fuck,” my hands fumble for the chain, the ring, and I need, I need. I stand and backpedal to the wall, my back hits it.

Sam hisses through his teeth. “Hey, hey, hey. Kevin, it’s just me. You gotta calm down.”

I twist to catch sight of the angel-warding. Scarlet, and still in place. “I—Oh. Oh, shit. Are you—“

“Fine. I’m fine.” But his face is twisted in pain, and I can’t—I stare at his eyes for that hint of blue. For something that will determine who is wearing Sam’s skin. Can’t be an angel. The warding is in place. But has it ever really helped? Can demons and angels really be kept away?

“Sorry,” I mutter, and I fist Mom’s ring.

“Come lay down,” he orders, and I return to the covers, carefully, but he pulls me in, my back to his chest, and I can hear his heavy breathing. “Try and sleep. All right? Nothing is going to happen. It’s just me.”

I believe him, I really do. But neither of really sleep after that.

_Day 321_

We give up around six. Sam gets up first, but I follow not two minutes later, watching the way he stiffly rolls his shoulder. That’ll be smarting for awhile, is my guess. I budge him out of the way to make coffee, as he says, “You should probably head back to Neighbor.” I don’t turn to look at him, but my body tenses. “It’s been over a week. Don’t try and tell me that you like being in the bunker. You get… more twitchy than normal.”

He’s not wrong. I hate this place. My nightmares get worse the longer I stay, my anxiety mounts. The only place I can think of that might be worse would be the houseboat. “You’re right.” I hand him a mug of coffee, feeling some of my tension release. I’ve been here too long.

But I’ll be back soon. When I leave, it’s with a travel mug of coffee, and a final, chaste kiss from Sam.


	6. Chapter 6

_Day 305_

Mom settles into the couch cushions with her eyes closed. The feathered lines around her eyes and mouth seem to be from smiling today as she listens. I hold the bow tighter and look back down at where the hair glides over the strings. After all these years, holding a cello doesn’t come as easily as it used to. Especially when I am more interested in seeing my mom happy than I am in hitting all the right notes. But it’s okay: it doesn’t sound terrible, she doesn’t wince as I play. I don’t have to be perfect.

Funny that it took dying to teach me what years of therapy couldn’t.

I’m just hitting the best part of what I’m pretending is Bach Suite No. 1 when my phone rings. I go still when I recognize the number. _666_. My breath comes in short pants. Not again. Not again. Okay, I can’t freak out this time. I pick up. “What do you want?”

“Friendly word of advice, Kev,” he says all slick, that kindly uncle voice he likes to think will bring me in. But something in his voice sounds off. Not angry, exactly, but that fragility that sometimes creeps into his voice ever since the failed Trial. I don’t buy it. “You might want to consider more carefully who you trust. Moose and I just finished with our deal that returned his brother dearest to him. I thought you might have some opinion on that. Regardless, I am a busy man, after all. Take care, Kev.”

He disconnects before I can say a damn thing. There’s no way. Sam wouldn’t—he wouldn’t just take a deal with Crowley without trying to catch him. Even if the deal was for Dean. He wouldn’t do that to my mom.

He wouldn’t do that to me.

Two nights ago, Sam called me as I’d turned Skyrim on for the night. “Hey,” he sounded awful, like he’d been chugging whiskey the entire time I hadn’t been talking to him. Maybe he had. “I miss him. Dean. And Cas. Every time I talk to Cas, he just sounds worse. I don’t know if it’s better to not see him, or if I’d rather watch him die.”

“Do you want me to come out there?”

“No. I think I may have a lead. One of my old hunter contacts called something in. I’m going to go check it out. So don’t be worried if you don’t hear from me in a few days. You doing okay?” 

“Fine. Keep me updated?” I asked, holding the phone tighter.

Sam sighed. “Of course.”

But I’d had a feeling he wouldn’t. The more time passed, the more secretive he got. I stopped getting daily updates on his progress, even as I gave him mine and Mom’s. Desperate, even as I felt him moving further away, I said, “I miss you. Take care of yourself.”

When I call Sam, he doesn’t pick up. He doesn’t pick up any of the three times I call. I throw my phone across the room. Mom is stricken on the couch. “Crowley?” she whispers, glancing at the door.

“Mom. I need to go back to the bunker. Think you’ll be okay by yourself here?” There’s only one solution. If he won’t answer my calls, I have to go to him. I have to know. Even if Crowley is just trying to throw a wedge between us. Even if it is a trap. I have to know if Sam just let Crowley go. After all the work we did. After what he said about helping us.

Mom squares her shoulders. All of the relaxation she got from my playing the cello is gone. “Yes. I’ll see if Jody is busy, and whether she’d like some company. Are you all right, honey?”

“Fine. I just need to go. I need to know.”

_Day 304_

The sixteen hours it takes me to get there is unbearable. Moreso than usual. I try calling Sam again, to no avail, and I can’t stop shaking. I don’t stand outside this time. No, I go straight into the bunker, and the first thing I see is Dean at the table, blinking in exhaustion at a burger. My breath stalls in my throat. “Dean?” I hold onto the stair railing tightly. Crowley always lies. But he was right about not trusting the boys. He always has been. I’ve always known that. “How long have you been here?”

“Kevin?” he croaks. Then clears his throat. “Uh. A couple days. Been cured a bit over a day, I think.” He looks back down at his burger.

As ever, Dean smells soft and nearly sweet, sharply like the citrus soap he shares with Sam. “Sam found you, then?” Obvious question with an obvious answer. Dean doesn’t bother.

“Heard about your mom. Tough break,” he rasps without looking at me.

I hope he feels guilty. I want him to feel as badly as I do, but he isn’t my concern anymore. It’s Sam I need to talk to. Sam, who is slumped against a counter in the kitchen when I find him. I smell him first. Mostly sour alcohol. Apparently finding Dean wasn’t everything he hoped it would be, and I’m glad. “You let Crowley go.” It isn’t a question. Crowley obviously isn’t here. Dean is. “In exchange for Dean, right?”

“Kevin. I don’t want to talk about this right now.” 

Sam won’t look at me. He keeps staring at the sink, and I want to dig my fingers into his shoulder to make him look at me. I take a deep shaky breath that doesn’t calm me at all. “Tough. I deserve an answer, Sam.”

“Fine.” He whirls on me then, towering over me, anger and pain all sharp lines in him. “I did. I let Crowley go. I traded Dean for the First Blade. Dean was a Hell Knight. He was trying to kill me. If Cas hadn’t… Look. Your mom has a little less than a year left. I prioritized. Dean was immediate. We still have time to save your mom, Kevin. If there had been a way to save Dean and get Crowley, I would have, but…”

A year ago, I might I have believed him. I might have swallowed the greater good, prioritizing line because I had no other option. I had no where to go. No resources. All I had was fear and the sense that if I didn’t translate the angel tablet, the world might end. Now? I’m not that stupid. I know what prioritizing means to the brothers. It means each other, every time.

It doesn’t matter what the cost is.

I try not to think about Sam’s hands on my cheeks. The nights we spent curled against each other. The way he smelled in the morning after a shower. I try not to think about him gently trailing fingers up my neck. Or the feel of his mouth. 

Stupid me, to think that it meant anything. How could we try anything, how could we feel anything, when both of us knew what the bottom line was?

He cannot care much about me in the face of Dean, like I can’t care in the face of my mother. 

“Don’t try and feed me that shit. Just don’t. I’m not stupid. Dean is all you care about. Period. I get that. As long as nothing gets in the way of that—“

Sam slams his hand down on the counter loud enough I flinch. “That’s not it! Do you understand how powerful and dangerous Hell Knights are? Do you understand what could have happened if we let Dean keep running around reeking havoc? Running around with Crowley, might I add? To get to Crowley, we would have had to go through Dean eventually. This way, it’ll be easier for us to do later. Trust me just a little, will you?” He stops, a muscle in his cheek jumping. “I know it’s hard. But, please. Just think for a minute. If Crowley was the one who told you about this, then you know he’s trying to alienate us. This is part of his plan.”

“I don’t care. I don’t _care_ , Sam. This isn’t about Crowley! This is about you and me. All right? I’m upset because you and Dean always choose each other over anything, no matter what! No matter what Dean did to you, no matter who gets hurt in the process. Look, I’m sorry. I am sorry. But I can’t do this! I can’t be part of this crazy thing you two have going. I did that! And I ended up dead. My mom sold her soul to get me back. I have to take care of us, before I can even start trying to deal with the crazy, fucked up thing you two have going on. I can’t do it anymore.” My chest is heaving, I can’t breathe, there are goosebumps rising up on my skin, and I really just want to cry. “I just—I need—“ I need a minute. My eyes burn as I turn away from him, and without another word, I slink back to my room.

Maybe this will look better in the morning. Maybe I’ll accept his argument. His apology. Maybe I’ll look at Dean, and accept that he had to come first. 

I curl under the covers, breathing heavily. Really, I shouldn’t be surprised. I knew when Sam and I started that we might end up here. Even if we tried to forget our history of failures, it always existed. Would always exist. Trying to forget them to pursue some farce of romance—it could never be done.

And now here we are. Dean coiled in the living room like a kicked dog. Sam drinking and drinking away whatever Dean did to him. Me, angry that my family was abandoned for theirs again. How many times must we suffer for them? For their mistakes? For their goals?

I take another shuddering breath. How many times am I going to trust them, before I learn? You would think the stories I heard in Heaven would have taught me.

Just as I’ve calmed enough to consider sleeping, the door creaks open, and I smell the harsh booze scent. I shut my eyes tightly, curling myself under the blankets. Sam staggers to the bed. For a moment, he hesitates, deciding whether or not to get in with me, then he flops down on the floor, head resting on the bed. “I’m sorry,” he slurs, “Kevin, I’m—it made the most sense. I had to.” 

His breathing hitches. A soft animal noise of pain, more like what omegas sound like in movies. “I don’t want to fight with you. Please.” he murmurs.

I struggle not to snarl at him, because truth be told, I don’t want to fight either. “I’m still angry,” I tell him. “I probably will stay angry. But I understand. I do understand.”

In his position, I would have done the same, probably. We’re not that different.

It doesn’t change anything though.

I feel him shudder beside me, before his breathing smooths out, and the alcohol takes him under. Not long after, I follow. 

_Day 303_

I wake to Sam’s sharp gasp for breath. He jerks from where he was leaning against my bed, head twisting wildly before his gaze finally lands on me. Sam goes still, like all the life has been sucked out of him, then folds in on himself, head in his hands. “God,” he mutters, “God, God, God.” His voice is thin, defeated, and pain snags in my throat.

His pain doesn’t really make me feel better. Which sucks. Because he’s got enough of it right now. Hesitantly, I put a hand on his head.

“I’m sorry,” he chokes. “All of this is so—is so—Dean wasn’t himself. It wasn’t his fault. But if we don’t find a way to get rid of the Mark, he’ll—“ He sucks in another breath. “You’ll stay, won’t you? We’ll find Crowley, and a way to cleanse Dean, and—“

I consider it. Pretending like nothing happened. Moving forward with our relationship. Forgetting the past. Then I remember Dean, and Sam’s broken promise, and Cas’s broken promise, and Dean—I shake my head. At least for now, I have to be with the one person I can trust to help me. To help us. And that’s Mom. It always has been. Maybe someday, the brothers and I can try to make everything right, but now—with the memory of Sam dealing with Crowley— 

“At least for now, I need space. You and Dean figure your own stuff out. You do you. I’m gonna find Crowley.”

Sam clenches his jaw. He watches a spot over my head when he says, “Bye, Kevin.” 

That’s all. This time, I don’t turn back to get one last look at him.


End file.
